r 


LIBRARY 

UNIVERSITY  OF 

CALIFORNIA 

SAN  DIEGO 

V. 


STROUDSEURG  pilBtiC 
A'Ad 
MONROE  COUMTY  LIBRARY 


^^V 


NEW  EDITIONS  OF 

SWINBURNE'S  WORKS 

PUBLISHED  BY 

WORTIIINGTON  COMPANY. 


SWINBURNE  (Algernon  Charles).  Victor  Hugo,  i2mo, 

cloth  extra.    Just  published $i  25 

A  Midsummer  Holiday  and  other  Poems,  i  vol.  i2mo.     i  25 

A  Century  of  Roundels,  and  other  Poems.  i2mo. 

cloth  extra  i  25 

Tristram  of  Lyonesse,  and  other  Poems.  i2mo,  cloth,     i  25 

Songs  of  the  Spring  Tides.     i2mo,  cloth,   extra 

gilt I  25 

Studies  in  Song.     i2mo,  cloth  extra,  gilt  top i  25 

Mary  Stuart.     A  Tragedy.  i2mo,  cloth  extra,  gilt 

top  I  25 

Later  Poems  and  Ballads.     i2mo,  cloth,  beveled, 

gilt  top 125 

A  Study  of  Shakespeare.     By   Algernon  Charles 

Swinburne.     i2mo,  cloth  extra,  gilt  top i  25 

*^*  The  above  volumes  of  Mr.  Swinburne's  Works  have  now 
been  reduced  from  $1.75  to  $1.25,  including  the  new  work  just 
published,  VICTOR  HUGO. 

*^*  "The  one  faculty,"  says  Stedman,  "in  which  Swinburne  excels  any 
living  English  poet  is  his  miraculous  gift  of  rhythm — h;s  command  over  the  un- 
suspected sources  of  a  language.  Before  the  advent  of  Swinburne  we  did  not 
realize  the  full  scope  of  English  verse,  in  his  hands  it  is  like  the  violin  of 
Paganini.  The  range  of  his  fantasias,  ro^ilades.  arias,  new  effects  of  measure  and 
sound,  is  incomparable  with  anything  hitherto  known.  ...  In  his  poetry  we 
discover  qualities  we  did  not  know  were  m  our  language — a  softness  that  seemed 
Italian,  a  rugged  strength  we  thought  w.is  German,  a  blithe  and  d6bonnaire 
lightness  we  despaired  of  capturing  from  the  French." — Clarence  Stediiiati  in 
Victorian  Poets. 


VICTOR     HUGO 


ALGERNON  CHARLES  SWINBURNE 


NEW   YORK  : 

WORTHINGTON  CO.,  747  BROADWAY. 

1886. 


COPYRIGHT    BY 

R.  WORTHINGTON, 

1886. 


777^    WORK  OF   VICTOR  HUGO. 

In  the  spring  of  1616  the  greatest  Englishman 
of  all  time  passed  away  with  no  public  homage 
or  notice,  and  the  first  tributes  paid  to  his  mem- 
ory were  prefixed  to  the  miserably  garbled  and 
inaccurate  edition  of  his  works  which  was  issued 
seven  years  later  by  a  brace  of  players  under  the 
patronage  of  a  brace  of  peers.  In  the  spring  of 
1885  the  greatest  Frenchman  of  all  time  has 
passed  away  amid  such  universal  anguish  and 
passion  of  regret  as  never  before  accompanied 
the  death  of  the  greatest  among  poets.  The 
contrast  is  of  course  not  wholly  due  to  the  in- 
calculable progress  of  humanity  during  the  two 
hundred  and  sixty-nine  years  which  divide  the 
date  of  our  mourning  from  the  date  of  Shakes- 
peare's death:  nor  even  to  the  vast  superiority  of 
Frenchmen  to  Englishmen  in  the  quality  of  gen- 
erous, just,  and  reasonable  gratitude  for  the  very 
highest  of  all  benefits  that  man  can  confer  on 


6  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

mankind.  For  the  greatest  poet  of  this  century- 
has  been  more  than  such  a  force  of  indirect  and 
gradual  beneficence  as  every  great  writer  must 
needs  be.  His  spiritual  service  has  been  in  its 
inmost  essence,  in  its  highest  development,  the 
service  of  a  healer  and  a  comforter,  the  work  of 
a  redeemer  and  a  prophet.  Above  all  other 
apostles  who  have  brought  us  each  the  glad 
tidings  of  his  peculiar  gospel,  the  free  gifts  of 
his  special  inspiration,  has  this  one  deserved  to 
be  called  by  the  most  beautiful  and  tender  of  all 
human  titles — the  son  of  consolation.  His  burn- 
ing wrath  and  scorn  unquenchable  were  fed  with 
light  and  heat  from  the  inexhaustible  dayspring 
of  his  love — a  fountain  of  everlasting  and  uncon- 
suming  fire.  We  know  of  no  such  great  poet  so 
good,  of  no  such  good  man  so  great  in  genius: 
not  though  Milton  and  Shelley,  our  greatest  lyric 
singer  and  our  single  epic  poet,  remain  with  us 
for  signs  and  examples  of  devotion  as  heroic  and 
self-sacrifice  as  pure.  And  therefore  it  is  but 
simply  reasonable  that  not  those  alone  should 
mourn  for  him  who  have  been  reared  and  nur- 
tured on  the  fruits  of  his  creative  spirit:  that 
those  also  whom  he  wrought  and  fought  for, 
but  who  know  him  only  as  their  champion  and 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  7 

their  friend — they  that  cannot  even  read  him, 
but  remember  how  he  labored  in  their  cause, 
that  their  children  might  fare  otherwise  than 
they — should  bear  no  unequal  part  in  the  burden 
of  this  infinite  and  worldwide  sorrow. 

For  us,  who  from  childhood  upwards  have  fos- 
tered and  fortified  whatever  of  good  was  born  in 
us — all  capacity  of  spiritual  work,  all  seed  of 
human  sympathy,  all  powers  of  hope  and  faith, 
all  passions  and  aspirations  found  loyal  to  the 
service  of  duty  and  of  love — with  the  bread  of 
his  deathless  word  and  the  wine  of  his  immortal 
song,  the  one  thing  possible  to  do  in  this  first 
hour  of  bitterness  and  stupefaction  at  the  sense 
of  a  loss  not  possible  yet  to  realize,  is  not  to 
declaim  his  praise  or  parade  our  lamentation  in 
modulated  effects  or  efforts  of  panegyric  or  of 
dirge:  it  is  to  reckon  up  once  more  the  stand- 
ing account  of  our  all  but  incalculable  debt.  A 
brief  and  simple  summary  of  his  published  works 
may  probably  lay  before  the  student  some  points 
and  some  details  not  generally  familiar  to  the 
run  of  English  readers:  and  I  know  not  what  bet- 
ter service  might  be  done  them  than  to  bring 
into  their  sight  such  aspects  of  the  most  multi- 
form and  many-sided  genius  that   ever  wrought 


8  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

in  prose  or  verse  as  are  least  obvious  and  least 
notorious  to  the  foreign  world  of  letters. 

Poet,  dramatist,  novelist,  historian,  philosopher, 
and  patriot,  the  spiritual  sovereign  of  the  nine- 
teenth century  was  before  all  things  and  above  all 
things  a  poet.  Throughout  all  the  various  and 
ambitious  attempts  of  his  marvellous  boyhood — 
criticism,  drama,  satire,  elegy,  epigram,  and  ro- 
mance— the  dominant  vein  is  poetic.  His  example 
will  stand  forever  as  the  crowning  disproof  of  the 
doubtless  more  than  plausible  opinion  that  the 
most  amazing  precocity  of  power  is  a  sign  of  en- 
suing impotence  and  premature  decay.  There  was 
never  a  more  brilliant  boy  than  Victor  Hugo;  but 
there  has  never  been  a  greater  man.  At  any 
other  than  a  time  of  mourning  it  might  be  neither 
unseasonable  nor  unprofitable  to  observe  that  the 
boy's  early  verse,  moulded  on  the  models  of  the 
eighteenth  century,  is  an  arsenal  of  satire  on  rev- 
olutionary principles  or  notions  which  might  suf- 
fice to  furnish  forth  with  more  than  their  natural 
equipment  of  epigram  a  whole  army  of  reaction- 
ary rhymesters  and  pamphleteers.  But  from  the 
first,  without  knowing  it,  he  was  on  the  road  to 
Damascus:  if  not  to  be  struck  down  by  sudden 
miracle,  yet  by  no  less  inevitable  a  process  to  un- 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO  9 

dergo  a  no  less  unquestionable  conversion.  At 
sixteen  he  wrote  for  a  wager  in  the  space  of  a 
fortnight  the  chivalrous  and  heroic  story  of  Bng- 
Jargal;  afterwards  recast  and  reinformed  with 
fresh  vigor  of  vitality,  when  the  author  had  at- 
tained the  maturer  age  of  twenty-three.  His  ten- 
derness and  manliness  of  spirit  were  here  made 
nobly  manifest:  his  originality  and  ardor  of  imagi- 
nation, wild  as  yet  and  crude  and  violent,  found 
vent  two  years  later  in  Han  d'Islande.  But  no  boy- 
ish work  on  record  ever  showed  more  singular  force 
of  hand,  more  brilliant  variety  of  power:  though 
the  author's  criticism  ten  years  later  admits  that 
"  il  n'y  a  dans  Han  d' Islande  qu'une  chose  sentie, 
I'amour  du  jeune  homme;  qu'une  chose  observee, 
I'amour  de  la  jeune  fiUe."  But  as  the  work  of  a 
boy's  fancy  or  invention,  touched  here  and  there 
with  genuine  humor,  terror,  and  pathos,  it  is  not 
less  wonderful  than  are  the  author's  first  odes  for 
ease  and  force  and  freshness  and  fluency  of  verse 
imbued  with  simple  and  sincere  feeling,  with 
cordial  and  candid  faith.  And  in  both  these  boy- 
ish stories  the  hand  of  a  soldier's  son,  a  child  of 
the  camp,  reared  in  the  lap  of  war  and  cradled  in 
traditions  of  daring,  is  evident  whenever  an  epi- 
sode of  martial  adventure  comes  in   amoncf  the 


lo         A  src/nr  of  victor  hi/go. 

more  fantastic  excursions  of  adolescent  inventive- 
ness. But  it  is  in  the  ballads  written  between  his 
twenty-second  and  his  twenty-seventh  year  that 
Victor  Hugo  first  showed  himself,  beyond  all 
question  and  above  all  cavil,  an  original  and  a 
great  poet.  La  CJiasse  du  Biirgrai'e  and  Le  Pas 
cVArines  du  Rot  Jean  would  suffice  of  themselves 
to  establish  that.  The  fire,  the  music,  the  force, 
the  tenderness,  the  spirit  of  these  glorious  little 
poems  must  needs,  one  would  think,  impress  even 
such  readers  as  might  be  impervious  to  the  charm 
of  their  exquisitely  vigorous  and  dexterous  execu- 
tion. Take  for  example  this  one  stanza  from  the 
ballad  last  mentioned: — 

La  cohue, 
Flot  de  fer, 
Frappe,  hue, 
Remplit  I'air, 
Et,  profonde, 
Tourne  et  gronde 
Comme  une  onde 
Sur  la  mer. 

It  will  of  course,  I  should  hope,  be  understood 
once  for  all  that  when  I  venture  to  select  for 
special  mention  any  special  poem  of  Hugo's  I  do 
not  dream  of  venturing  to  suggest  that  others 
are  not  or  may  not  be  fully  as  worthy  of  homage, 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  n 

or  that  anything  of  this  incomparable  master's 
work  will  not  requite  our  study  or  does  not 
demand  our  admiration;  I  do  but  take  leave  to 
indicate  in  passing  some  »of  those  which  have 
been  to  me  especially  fruitful  of  enduring  delight, 
and  still  are  cherished  in  consequence  with  a 
peculiar  gratitude. 

At  twenty-five  the  already  celebrated  lyric 
poet  published  his  magnificent  historic  drama  of 
Cronnvell:  a  work  sufficient  of  itself  to  establish 
the  author's  fame  for  all  ages  in  which  poetry 
and  thought,  passion  and  humor,  subtle  truth 
of  character,  stately  perfection  of  structure,  facile 
force  of  dialogue  and  splendid  eloquence  of  style, 
continue  to  be  admired  and  enjoyed.  That  the 
author  has  apparently  confounded  one  earl  of 
Rochester  with  another  more  famous  bearer  of 
the  same  title  must  not  be  allowed  to  interfere 
with  the  credit  due  to  him  for  wide  and  various 
research.  Any  dullard  can  point  the  finger  at  a 
slip  here  and  there  in  the  history,  a  change  or 
an  error  of  detail  or  of  date:  it  needs  more  care 
to  appreciate  the  painstaking  and  ardent  industry 
which  has  collected  and  fused  together  a  great 
mass  of  historic  and  legendary  material,  the  fer- 
vent energy  of  inspiration   which   has   given  life, 


12  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

order,   and   harmony  to   the   vast    and   versatile 

design.     As  to  the  executive  part  of  the  poem, 

the    least    that   can    be    said    by   any    competent 

judge  of  that  matter  is  that  Moliere  was  already 

equalled   and  Corneille  was  already  excelled  in 

their  respective  provinces  of  verse  by  the  young 

conqueror    whose    rule    was    equal    and    imperial 

over  every  realm  of  song.     The  comic  interludes 

or   episodes    of    the    second    and    third    acts,    so 

admirably  welded  into  the    structure   or   woven 

into  the  thread  of  the  action,   would  suffice  to 

prove   this   when   collated   with  the   seventeenth 

scene  of  the  third  act   and   the  great   speech  of 

Cromwell  in  the  fifth. 

Arretez  ! 

Que  veut  dire  ceci  ?     Pourquoi  cette  couronne  ? 

Que  veut-on  que  j'en  fasse  .?  et  qui  done  me  la  donne  ? 

Est-ce  un  reve  ?     Est-ce  bien  le  bandeau  que  je  vols  ? 

De  quel  droit  me  vienl-on  confondre  avec  les  rois? 

Qui  mele  un  tel  scandale  a  nos  pieuses  fetes 

Quoi !  leur  couronne,  a  moi  qui  fais  tomber  leurs  tetes  ? 

S'est-on  mepris  au  but  de  ces  solennitesi* — 

Milords,  messieurs,  anglais,  freres,  qui  m'ecoutez, 

Je  ne  viens  point  ici  ceindre  le  diademe, 

Mais  retremper  men  titre  au  sein  du  peuple  meme, 

Rajeunir  men  pouvoir,  renouveler  mes  droits. 

L'ecarlate  sacree  etait  teinte  deux  fois. 

Cette  pourpre  est  au  peuple,  et,  d'une  ame  loyale, 

Je  la  tiens  de  lui. — Mais  la  couronne  royale  ! 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  13 

Quand  I'ai-je  demandee  ?     Et  qui  dit  que  j'en  veux  ? 
Je  ne  donnerais  pas  un  seul  de  mes  cheveux, 
De  ces  cheveux  blanchis  a  servir  I'Angleterre, 
Pour  tous  les  fleurons  d'or  des  princes  de  la  terre. 
Oiez  cela  d'ici !     Remportez,  remportez 
Ce  hochet,  ridicule  entre  les  vanites  ! 
N'attendez  pas  qu'  aux  pieds  je  foule  ces  miseres ! 
Qu'ils  me  connaissent  mal,  les  hommes  peu  sinceres 
Qui  m'osent  affronter  jusqu'a  me  couronner  ! 
J'ai  rcfu  de  Dieu  plus  qu'ils  ne  peuvent  donner. 
La  grace  inamissible;  et  de  moi  je  suis  maitre. 
Une  fois  fils  du  ciel,  peut-on  cesser  de  I'etre  ? 
De  nos  prosperites  I'univers  est  jaloux. 
Que  me  faut-il  de  plus  que  le  bonheur  de  tous? 
Je  vous  I'ai  dit.     Ce  peuple  est  le  peuple  d'elite. 
L'Europe  de  cette  ile  est  I'humble  satellite. 
Tout  cede  a  notre  etoile;  et  I'impie  est  maudit. 
U  semble,  a  voir  cela,  que  le  Seigneur  ait  dit: 
— Angleterre  !  grandis,  et  sois  ma  fille  ainee. 
Entre  les  nations  mes  mains  t'ont  couronnee; 
Sois  done  ma  bien-aimee,  et  marche  a  mes  coles. — 
II  deroule  sur  nous  d'abondantes  bontes; 
Chaque  jour  qui  finit,  chaque  jour  qui  commence, 
Ajoute  un  anneau  d'or  a  cette  chaine  immense. 
On  croirait  que  ce  Dieu,  terrible  aux  philistins, 
A  comme  un  ouvrier  compose  nos  destins; 
Que  son  bras,  sur  un  axe  indestructible  aux  ages, 
De  ce  vaste  edifice  a  scelle  les  rouages, 
Q^^uvre  mysterieuse,  et  dont  scs  longs  efforts 
Pour  des  siecles  peut-etre  ont  monte  les  ressorts. 
Ainsi  tout  va.     La  roue,  a  la  roue  enchainee, 
Mord  de  sa  dent  de  fer  la  machine  entrainee; 


14  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

Les  massifs  balanciers,  les  antennes,  les  poids, 
Labyrinthe  vivant,  se  meuvent  a  la  fois; 
L'effrayante  machine  accomplit  sans  relache 
Sa  marche  inexorable  et  sa  puissante  tache; 
Et  des  peuples  entiers,  pris  dans  ses  mille  bras, 
Disparaitraient  broyes,  s'ils  ne  se  rangeaient  pas. 
Et  j'entraverais  Dieu,  dont  la  loi  salutaire 
Nous  fait  un  sort  a  part  dans  le  sort  de  la  terre  ! 
J'irais,  du  peuple  elu  foulant  le  droit  ancien, 
Mettre  mon  interet  a  la  place  du  sien  ! 
Pilote,  j'ouvrirais  la  voile  aux  vents  contraires ! 

{Hochanl  la  ick.) 

Non,  je  ne  donne  pas  ceile  juie  aux  faux  freres. 
Le  vieux  navire  anglais  est  toujours  roi  des  flots. 
Le  colosse  est  debout.     Que  sont  d'obscurs  complots 
Conlre  les  hauts  destins  de  la  Grande-Bretagne  ? 
Qu  est-ce  qu'un  coup  de  pioche  aux  flancs  d'une  mon- 
tagne  ? 

{Prome7iant  des yeux  de  lynx  autour  de  ltd.) 

Avis  aux  malveillants  !  on  sait  tout  ce  qu'ils  font. 

Le  flot  est  transparent,  si  I'abime  est  profond. 

On  voit  le  fond  du  piege  ou  rampe  leur  pensee. 

La  vipere  parfois  de  son  dard  s'est  blessee; 

Au  feu  qu'on  allumait  souvent  on  se  brula; 

Et  les  yeux  du  Seigneur  vont  courant  9a  et  la. — 

Qui  du  peuple  et  des  rois  a  signe  le  divorce? 

Moi. — Croit-on  done  me  prendre  a  celte  vaine  amorce? 

Un  diademe  ! — Anglais,  j'en  brisais  autrefois. 

Sans  en  avoir  porte,  j'en  connais  bien  le  poids. 

Quitter  pour  une  cour  le  camp  qui  m'environne? 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  15 

Changer  mon  glaive  en  sceptre  et  mon  casque  en  cour- 

onne  ? 
Allons!  suis-je  un  enfant?  me  croit-on  ne  d'hier? 
Ne  sais-je  pas  que  Tor  pese  plus  que  le  fer  ? 
M'edifier  un  trone  !     Eh  !  c'est  creuser  ma  tombe. 
Cromwell,  pour  y  monter,  saittrop  comme  on  en  tombe. 
Et  d'ailleurs,  que  d'ennuis  s'amassent  sur  ces  fronts 
Qui  se  rident  sitot,  herisses  de  fleurons  ! 
Chacun  de  ces  fleurons  cache  une  ardente  epine. 
La  couronne  les  tue;  un  noir  souci  les  mine; 
Elle  change  en  tyran  le  mortel  le  plus  doux, 
Et,  pesant  sur  le  roi,  le  fait  peser  sur  tous. 
Le  peuple  les  admire,  et,  s'abdiquant  lui-meme, 
Compte  tous  les  rubis  dont  luit  le  diademe; 
Mais  comme  il  fremirait  pour  eux  de  leur  fardeau, 
S'il  regardait  le  front  et  non  pas  le  bandeau  ! 
Eux,  leur  charge  les  trouble,  et  leurs  mains  souveraines 
De  I'etat  chancelant  melent  bientot  les  renes. — 
Ah  !  remportez  ce  signe  execrable,  odieux  ! 
Ce  bandeau  trop  souvent  tombe  du  front  aux  yeux. — 

{Larmoyanl. ) 

Et  qu'en  ferais-je  enfin  ?     Mai  ne  pour  la  puissance, 

Je  suis  simple  de  coeur  et  vis  dans  I'innocence. 

Si  j'ai,  la  fronde  en  main,  veille  sur  le  bercail. 

Si  j'ai  devant  I'ecueil  pris  place  au  gouvernail, 

J'ai  du  me  devouer  pour  la  cause  commune. 

Mais  que  n'ai-je  vieilli  dans  mon  humble  fortune  ! 

Que  n'ai-je  vu  tomber  les  tyrans  aux  abois, 

A  I'ombre  de  mon  chaume  et  de  mon  petit  bois  ! 

Helas  !  j'eusse  aime  mieux  ces  champs  ou  Ton  respire, 

Le  ciel  m  en  est  lemoin,  que  les  soins  de  lempire; 


1 6  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

Et  Cromwell  eiit  trouve  plus  de  charme  cent  fois 
A  garder  ses  moutons  qu'a  detroner  des  rois  1 

{Pkura7il. ) 

Que  parle-t-on  de  sceptre  ?    Ah  \  j'ai  manque  ma  vie. 

Ce  morceau  de  clinquant  n'a  rien  qui  me  convie. 

Ayez  pitie  de  moi,  freres,  loin  d'envier 

Votrevieux  general,  votre  vieil  Olivier. 

Je  sens  men  bras  faiblir,  et  ma  fin  est  prochaine. 

Depuis  assez  longtemps  suis-je  pas  a  la  chaine  ? 

Je  suis  vieux,  je  suis  las;  je  demande  merci. 

N'est-il  pas  temps  qu'enfin  je  me  repose  aussi  ? 

Chaque  jour  j'en  appelle  a  la  bonte  divine, 

Et  devant  le  Seigneur  je  frappe  ma  poitrine. 

Que  je  veuille  etre  roi !     Si  frele  et  tant  d'orgueil  ! 

Ce  projet,  et  j'en  jure  a  cote  du  cercueil, 

II  m'est  plus  eiranger,  freres,  que  la  lumiere 

Du  soleil  a  I'enfant  dans  le  sein  de  sa  mere  ! 

Loin  ce  nouveau  pouvoir  a  mes  voeux  presente  ! 

Je  n'en  accepte  rien, — rien  que  I'heredite. 

The  subtlety  and  variety  of  power  displayed  in 
the  treatment  of  the  chief  character  should  be  evi- 
dent alike  to  those  who  look  only  on  the  upright 
side  of  it  and  those  who  can  see  only  its  more 
oblique  aspect.  The  Cromwell  of  Hugo  is  as  far 
from  the  faultless  monster  of  Carlyle's  creation 
and  adoration  as  from  the  all  but  unredeemed  vil- 
lain of  royalist  and  Hibernian  tradition:  he  is  a 
great  and  terrible  poetic  figure,  imbued  through- 
out with  active  life  and  harmonized   throughout 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  17 

by  imaginative  intuition:  a  patriot  and  a  tyrant,  a 
dissembler  and  a  believer,  a  practical  humorist 
and  a  national  hero. 

The  famous  preface  in  which  the  batteries  of 
pseudo  classic  tradition  were  stormed  and  shat- 
tered at  a  charge  has  itself  long  since  become  a 
classic.  That  the  greatest  poet  was  also  the 
greatest  prose-writer  of  his  generation  there  could 
no  longer  be  any  doubt  among  men  of  any  intel- 
ligence: but  not  even  yet  was  more  than  half 
the  greatnessof  his  multitudinous  force  revealed. 
Two  years  later,  at  the  age  of  twenty-seven,  he 
published  the  superb  and  entrancing  Oricntalcs: 
the  most  musical  and  many-colored  volume  of 
verse  that  ever  had  glorified  the  language.  From 
Le  Fell  du  Cicl  to  Sara  la  Baigneiise,  from  the 
thunder-peals  of  exterminating  judgment  to  the 
flute-notes  of  innocent  girlish  luxury  in  the  sense 
of  loveliness  and  life,  the  inexhaustible  range  of 
his  triumph  expands  and  culminates  and  extends. 
Shelley  has  left  us  no  more  exquisite  and  miracu- 
lous piece  of  lyrical  craftsmanship  than  Les  Djinns ; 
none  perhaps  so  rich  in  variety  of  modulation,  so 
perfect  in  rise  and  growth  and  relapse  and  reiter- 
ance  of  music. 


1 8  A  SlUDV  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

Murs,  ville, 

Et  port, 

Asile 

De  mort, 

Mer  grise 

Ou  brise 

La  brise, 

Tout  dort. 
Dans  la  plaine 
Nait  un  bruit. 
C'est  i'haleine 
De  la  nuit. 
Elle  brame 
Comme  une  ame 
Qu'une  flamme 
Toujours  suit. 

Then  the   terrible    music  of  the   flight  of  evil 

spirits — "  troupeau  lourd  et  rapide  " — grows  as  it 

were  note  by  note  and  minute  by  minute   up  to 

its  full  height  of  tempest,  and  again  relapses  and 

recedes  into  the  subsiding  whisper  of  the  corre- 

sponsive  close. 

Ce  bruit  vague 
Qui  s'endort, 
C'est  la  vague 
Sur  le  bord; 
C'est  la  plainte 
Presque  eteinte 
D'une  sainte 
Pour  un  mort. 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO,  19 

On  doute 
La  nuit  . . . 
Jecoute: — 
Tout  fuit. 
Tout  passe; 
L'espace 
Efface 
Le  bruit. 

And  here,  like  Shelley,  w^s  Hugo  already  the 
poet  of  freedom,  a  champion  of  the  sacred  right 
and  the  holy  duty  of  resistance.  The  husk  of  a 
royalist  education,  the  crust  of  reactionary  mis- 
conceptions, had  already  begun  to  drop  off;  not 
yet  a  pure  republican,  he  was  now  ripe  to  receive 
and  to  understand  the  doctrine  of  human  right, 
the  conception  of  the  common  weal,  as  distin- 
guished from  imaginary  duties  and  opposed  to 
hereditary  claims. 

The  twenty-eighth  year  of  his  life,  which  was 
illuminated  by  the  issue  of  these  passionate  and 
radiant  poems,  witnessed  also  the  opening  of  his 
generous  and  lifelong  campaign  or  crusade 
against  the  principle  of  capital  punishment.  With 
all  possible  reverence  and  all  possible  reluctance, 
but  remembering  that  without  perfect  straight- 
forwardness and  absolute  sincerity  I  should  be 
even  unworthier  than  I  am  to   speak   of  Victor 


20  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO, 

Hugo  at  all,  I  must  say  that  his  reasoning  on  this 
subject  seems  to  me  insufficient  and  inconclusive: 
that  his  own  radical  principle,  the  absolute  in- 
violability of  human  life,  the  absolute  sinfulness 
of  retributive  bloodshedding,  if  not  utterly  illogi- 
cal and  untenable,  is  tenable  or  logical  only  on 
the  ground  assumed  by  those  quaintest  though 
not  least  pathetic  among  fanatics  and  heroes,  the 
early  disciples  of  George  Fox,  If  a  man  tells  you 
that  supernatural  revelation  has  forbidden  him 
to  take  another  man's  life  under  all  and  any  cir- 
cumstances, he  is  above  or  beyond  refutation;  if 
he  says  that  self-defence  is  justifiable,  and  that 
righteous  warfare  is  a  patriotic  duty,  but  that  to 
exact  from  the  very  worst  of  murderers,  a  parri- 
cide or  a  poisoner,  a  Philip  the  Second  or  a  Na- 
poleon the  Third,  the  payment  of  a  life  for  a  life — 
or  even  of  one  infamous  existence  for  whole  hec- 
atombs of  innocent  lives — is  an  offence  against 
civilization  and  a  sin  against  humanity,  I  am  not 
merely  unable  to  accept,  but  incompetent  to  un- 
derstand his  argument.  We  may  most  heartily 
agree  with  him  that  France  is  degraded  by  the 
guillotine,  and  that  England  is  disgraced  by  the 
gallows,  and  yet  our  abhorrence  of  these  barbar- 
ous and  nauseous  brutalities  may  not  preclude  us 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  21 

from  feeling  that  a  dealer  (for  example)  in  pro- 
fessional infanticide  by  starvation  might  very 
properly  be  subjected  to  vivisection  without  an- 
aesthetics, and  that  all  manly  and  womanly  minds 
not  distorted  or  distracted  by  prepossessions  or 
assumptions  might  rationally  and  laudably  re- 
joice in  the  prospect  of  this  legal  and  equitable 
process.  "The  senseless  old  law  of  retaliation" 
{la  vicille  et  inept e  loi  du  talioii)  is  inept  or  sense- 
less only  when  the  application  of  it  is  false  to  the 
principle:  when  justice  in  theory  becomes  unjust 
in  practice.  Another  stale  old  principle  or  prov- 
erb— "  abusus  non  tollit  usum  — suffices  to  confute 
some  of  the  arguments — I  am  very  far  from  say- 
ing, all — adduced  or  alleged  by  the  ardent  elo- 
quence of  Victor  Hugo  in  his  admirable  master- 
piece of  terrible  and  pathetic  invention — Le 
dernier  joiir  d'un  condanine,  and  subsequently  in 
the  impressive  little  history  of  Claude  Giieiix,  in 
the  famous  speech  on  behalf  of  Charles  Hugo 
when  impeached  on  a  charge  of  insult  to  the  laws 
in  an  article  on  the  punishment  of  death,  and  in 
the  fervent  eloquence  of  his  appeal  on  the  case  of  a 
criminal  executed  in  Guernsey,  and  of  his  protest 
addressed  to  Lord  Palmerston  against  the  horrible 
result    of  its    rejection.      That   certain  surviving 


2  2  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

methods  of  execution  are  execrable  scandals  to 
the  country  which  maintains  them,  he  has  proved 
beyond  all  humane  or  reasonable  question;  and 
that  all  murderers  are  not  alike  inexcusable  is  no 
less  indisputable  a  proposition;  but  beyond  these 
two  points  the  most  earnest  and  exuberant  advo- 
cacy can  advance  nothing  likely  to  convince  any 
but  those  already  converted  to  the  principle  that 
human  life  must  never  be  taken  in  punishment  of 
crime — that  there  are  not  criminals  whose  exist- 
ence insults  humanity,  and  cries  aloud  on  justice 
for  mercy's  very  sake  to  cut  it  off. 

The  next  year  (1830)  is  famous  forever  beyond 
all  others  in  the  history  of  French  literature: 
it  was  the  year  of  Hcrnani,  the  date  of  libera- 
tion and  transfiguration  for  the  tragic  stage  of 
France.  The  battle  which  raged  round  the  first 
acted  play  of  Hugo's,  and  the  triumph  which 
crowned  the  struggles  of  its  champions,  are  not 
these  things  written  in  too  many  chronicles  to  be 
for  the  thousandth  time  related  here  }  And  of  its 
dramatic  and  poetic  quality  what  praise  could  be 
uttered  that  must  not  before  this  have  been  re- 
peated at  least  some  myriads  of  times  .''  But  if 
there  be  any  mortal  to  whom  the  heroic  scene  of 
the  portraits,  the  majestic  and  august  monologue 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  23 

of  Charles  the  Fifth  at  the  tomb  of  Charles  the 
Great,  the  terrible  beauty,  the  vivid  pathos,  the 
bitter  sweetness  of  the  close,  convey  no  sense  of 
genius  and  utter  no  message  of  delight,  we  can 
only  say  that  it  would  simply  be  natural,  consist- 
ent, and  proper  for  such  a  critic  to  recognize  in 
Shakespeare  a  barbarian,  and  a  Philistine  in 
Milton. 

Nevertheless,  if  we  are  to  obey  the  perhaps 
rather  childish  impulse  of  preference  and  selection 
among  the  highest  works  of  the  highest  among\ 
poets,  I  will  avow  that  to  my  personal  instinct  or 
apprehension  Marion  de  Lornie  seems  a  yet  more 
perfect  and  pathetic  masterpiece  than  even  Her-I 
nani  itself.  The  always  generous  and  loyal  Dumas 
placed  it  at  the  very  head  of  his  friend's  dramatic 
works.  Written,  as  most  readers  (I  presume)  will  re- 
member, before  its  predecessor  on  the  stage,  it  was 
prohibited  on  the  insanely  fatuous  pretext  that 
the  presentation  of  King  Louis  the  Thirteenth 
was  an  indirect  affront  to  the  majesty  of  King 
Charles  the  Tenth.  After  that  luckless  dotard 
had  been  driven  off  his  throne,  it  was  at  once  pro- 
posed to  produce  the  hitherto  interdicted  play 
before  an  audience  yet  palpitating  with  the  thrill 
of  revolution  and  resentment.    But  the  chivalrous 


24  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

loyalty  of  Victor  Hugo  refused  to  accept  a  facile 
and  factitious  triumph  at  the  expense  of  an  exiled 
old  man,  over  the  ruins  of  a  shattered  old  cause. 
The  play  was  not  permitted  by  its  author  to  enter 
till  the  spring  of  the  following  year  on  its  inevita- 
ble course  of  glory.  It  is  a  curious  and  memora- 
ble fact  that  the  most  tender-hearted  of  all  great 
poets  had  originally  made  the  hero  of  this  tragedy 
leave  the  heroine  unforgiven  for  the  momentary 
and  reluctant  relapse  into  shame  by  which  she 
had  endeavored  to  repurchase  his  forfeited  life; 
and  that  Prosper  Merimee  should  have  been  the 
first,  Marie  Dorval  the  second,  to  reclaim  a  little 
mercy  for  the  penitent.  It  is  to  their  pleading 
that  we  owe  the  sublime  pathos  of  the  final  part- 
ing between  Marion  and  Didier. 
/  In  one  point  it  seems  to  me  that  this  immortal 
masterpiece  may  perhaps  be  reasonably  placed, 
WiXh  Le  Rot  s' amuse  and  Ruy  Blas/xw  triune  su- 
premacy at  the  head  of  Victor  Hugo's  plays.  The 
wide  range  of  poetic  abilities,  the  harmonious  va- 
riety of  congregated  powers,  displayed  in  these 
three  great  tragedies  through  almost  infinite  vari- 
ations of  terror  and  pity  and  humor  and  sublime 
surprise,  will  seem  to  some  readers,  whose  rever- 
ence is  no  less  grateful  for  other  gifts  of  the  same 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 


25 


great  hand,  unequalled  at  least  till  the  advent  in 
his  eighty-first  year  of  Torqucynada. 

Victor  Hugo  was  not  yet  thirty  when  all  these 
triumphs  lay  behind  him.  In  the  twenty-ninth 
year  of  a  life  which  would  seem  fabulous  and 
incredible  in  the  record  of  its  achievements  if 
divided  by  lapse  of  time  from  all  possible  proof  of 
its  possibility  by  the  attestation  of  dates  and 
facts,  he  published  in  February  Notre-Dame  de 
Pat-is,  in  November  Les  Feuilles  d' Aiitomne :  that 
the  two  dreariest  months  of  the  year  might  not 
only  "  smell  April  and  May,"  but  outshine  July 
and  August.  The  greatest  of  all  tragic  romances 
has  a  Grecian  perfection  of  structure,  with  a  Gothic 
intensity  of  pathos.  To  attempt  the  praise  of  such 
a  work  would  be  only  less  idle  than  to  refuse  it. 
Terror  and  pity,  with  eternal  fate  for  key-note  to 
the  strain  of  story,  never  struck  deeper  to  men's 
hearts  through  more  faultless  evolution  of  com- 
bining circumstance  on  the  tragic  stage  of  Athens. 
Louis  the  Eleventh  has  been  painted  by  many 
famous  hands,  but  Hugo's  presentation  of  him,  as 
compared  for  example  with  Scott's,  is  as  a  por- 
trait by  Velasquez  to  a  portrait  by  Vandyke.  The 
style  was  a  new  revelation  of  the  supreme  capaci- 
ties of  human  speech:  the  touch  of  it  on  any  sub- 


26  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

ject  of  description  or  of  passion  is  as  the  touch  of 
the  sun  for  penetrating  irradiation  and  vivid  evo- 
cation of  Hfe. 

From  the  Autumn  Leaves  to  the  Songs  of  the 
Twilight,  and  again  from  the  Inner  Voices  to  the 
Sunbeams  and  Shadotus,  the  continuous  jet  of 
lyric  song  through  a  space  of  ten  fertile  years  was 
so  rich  in  serene  and  various  beauty  that  the  one 
thing  notable  in  a  flying  review  of  its  radiant 
course  is  the  general  equality  of  loveliness  inform 
and  color,  which  is  relieved  and  heightened  at 
intervals  by  some  especial  example  of  a  beauty 
more  profound  or  more  sublime.  The  first  volume 
of  the  four,  if  I  mistake  not,  won  a  more  immedi- 
ate and  universal  homage  than  the  rest:  its  unsur- 
passed melody  was  so  often  the  raiment  of  emo- 
tion which  struck  home  to  all  hearts  a  sense  of 
domestic  tenderness  too  pure  and  sweet  and  simple 
for  perfect  expression  by  any  less  absolute  and 
omnipotent  lord  of  style,  that  it  is  no  wonder  if  in 
many  minds — many  mothers'  minds  especially — 
there  should  at  once  have  sprung  up  an  all  but 
ineradicable  conviction  that  no  subsequent  verse 
must  be  allowed  to  equal  or  excel  the  volume 
which  contained  such  flower-like  jewels  of  song  as 
the  nineteenth  and  twentieth  of  these  unwither- 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  27 

ing  and  imperishable  Leaves.  But  no  error  possi- 
ble to  a  rational  creature  could  be  more  serious 
or  more  complete  than  the  assumption  of  any 
inferiority  in  the  volume  containing  the  two  glo- 
rious poems  addressed  to  Admiral  Canaris,  the 
friend  (may  I  be  forgiven  the  filial  vanity  or  egot- 
ism which  impels  me  to  record  it  ?)  of  the  present 
writer's  father  in  his  youth;  the  two  first  in  date 
of  Hugo's  finest  satires,  the  lines  that  scourge  a 
backbiter  and  the  lines  that  brand  a  traitor  (the 
resonant  and  radiant  indignation  of  the  latter 
stands  unsurpassed  in  the  very  Chdtiments  them- 
selves) ;  the  two  most  enchanting  aubades  or  songs 
of  sunrise  that  ever  had  outsung  the  birds  and 
outsweetened  the  flowers  of  the  dawn;  and — for 
here  I  can  cite  no  more — the  closing  tribute  of 
lines  more  bright  than  the  lilies  whose  name  they 
bear,  offered  by  a  husband's  love  at  the  sweet  still 
shrine  of  motherhood  and  wifehood.  The  first  two 
stanzas  of  the  second  aubadcare  all  that  can  here 
be  quoted. 

L'aurore  s'allume, 
L'ombre  epaisse  fuit; 
Le  reve  et  la  brume 
Vent  ou  va  la  nuit; 
Paupieres  et  roses 
S'ouvrent  demi-closes; 


28  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO, 

Du  reveil  des  choses 
On  entend  le  bruit. 

Tout  chante  et  murmure. 
Tout  parle  a  la  fois, 
Fumce  et  verdure, 
Les  nids  et  les  toits; 
Le  vent  parle  aux  chenes, 
L'eau  parle  aux  fontaines; 
Toutes  les  haleines 
Deviennent  des  voix. 

And  in  each  of  the  two  succeeding  volumes  there 
is,  among-  all  their  other  things  of  price,  a  lyric 
which  may  even  yet  be  ranked  with  the  highest 
subsequent  work  of  its  author  for  purity  of  per- 
fection, for  height  and  fulness  of  note,  for  music 
and  movement  and  informing  spirit  of  life.  We 
ought  to  have  in  English,  but  I  fear — or  rather  I 
am  only  too  sure — we  have  not,  a  song  in  which 
the  sound  of  the  sea  is  rendered  as  in  that  trans- 
lation of  the  trumpet-blast  of  the  night-wind, 
with  all  its  wails  and  pauses  and  fluctuations 
and  returns,  done  for  once  into  human  speech 
and  interpreted  into  spiritual  sense  forever.  For 
instinctive  mastery  of  its  means  and  absolute 
attainment  of  its  end,  for  majesty  of  living  music 
and  fidelity  of  sensitive  imagination,  there  is  no 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  29 

lyric  poem  in  any  language  more  wonderful  or 
more  delightful. 

UNE  NUIT  QU'ON  ENTENDAIT  LA  MER 
SANS  LA    VOIR. 

Quels  sent  ces  bruits  sourds? 
Ecoutez  vers  ronde 
Cette  voix  profonde 
Qui  pleure  toujours 
Et  qui  toujours  gronde, 
Quoiqu'un  son  plus  clair 
Parfois  rinterrompe  .  .  . — 
Le  vent  de  la  mer 
Souffle  dans  sa  trompe. 

Comme  il  pleut  ce  soir  ! 

N'est-ce  pas,  mon  bote  ? 

La-bas,  a  la  cote, 

Le  ciel  est  bien  noir, 

La  mer  est  bien  haute 

On  dirait  I'hiver; 

Parfois  on  sy  trompe  .  .  . — 

Le  vent  de  la  mer 

Souffle  dans  sa  trompe. 

Oh  !  marins  perdus  ! 

Au  loin,  dans  cetie  ombre, 

Sur  la  nef  qui  sombre, 

Que  de  bras  tendus 

Vers  la  terre  sombre  ! 

Pas  d'ancre  de  fer 

Que  le  flot  ne  rompe. — 


30  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO, 

Le  vent  de  la  mer 
Souffle  dans  sa  trompe. 

Nochers  imprudents  ! 
Le  vent  dans  la  voile 
Dechire  la  toile 
Comme  avec  les  dents  ! 
La-haut  pas  d'etoile  ! 
L'un  luite  avec  I'air, 
.  L'autre  est  a  la  pompe. — • 
Le  vent  de  la  mer 
Souffle  dans  sa  trompe. 

C'est  toi,  c'est  ton  fsu 
Que  le  nocher  rtve, 
Quand  le  flot  s'eleve, 
Chan  lelier  que  Dieu 
Pose  sur  la  greve, 
Phare  au  rouge  eclair 
Que  la  brume  estompe  ! — 
Le  vent  de  la  mer 
Souffle  dans  sa  trompe. 

A  yet  sweeter  and  sadder  and  more  magical 
sea-song  there  \vas  yet  to  come  years  after — but 
only  from  the  lips  of  an  exile.  Of  the  ballad — so 
to  call  it,  if  any  term  of  definition  may  suffice — 
which  stands  out  as  a  crowning  splendor  among 
Les  Rayons  et  Ics  Ombres,  not  even  Hugo's  own 
eloquence,  had  it  been  the  work  (which  is  impos 
sible)  of  any  other  great  poet  in  all  time,  could 
have  said  anything  adequate  at   all.     Not  even 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  31 

Coleridge  and  Shelley,  the  sole  twin  sovereigns 
of  English  lyric  poetry,  could  have  produced  this 
little  piece  of  lyric  work  by  combination  and  by 
fusion  of  their  gifts.  The  pathetic  truthfulness 
and  the  simple  manfulness  of  the  mountain  shep- 
herd's distraction  and  devotion  might  have  been 
given  in  ruder  phrase  and  tentative  rendering  by 
the  nameless  ballad-makers  of  the  border:  but 
here  is  a  poem  which  unites  something  of  the 
charm  of  Clerk  Saunders  and  The  Wife  of  UsJier  s 
Well  with  something  of  the  magic  of  Christabel 
and  the  Ode  to  the  West  Wind;  a  thing,  no  doubt, 
impossible;  but  none  the  less  obviously  accom- 
plished.' 

'  In  the  winter  of  the  year  which  in  spring  had  seen  Lcs  Rayons 
ct  h's  Ombres  come  forth  to  kindle  and  refresh  the  hearts  of  readers, 
Victor  Hugo  pubhshed  an  ode  in  the  same  key  as  those  To  the  Col- 
i:»in  and  To  the  Arch  of  Trinvtph,  on  the  return  and  reinterment 
of  the  dead  Napoleon.  Full  of  noble  feeling  and  sonorous  elo- 
quence, the  place  of  this  poem  in  any  collection  of  its  author's 
works  is  distinctly  and  unmistakably  marked  out  by  every  quality 
it  has  and  by  every  quality  it  wants.  In  style  and  in  sentiment,  in 
opinion  and  in  rhythm,  it  is  one  with  the  national  and  political 
poems  which  had  already  l>ecn  published  by  the  author  since  the 
date  of  his  Orientates:  in  other  words,  it  is  in  every  possible  point 
utterly  and  absolutely  unlike  the  jioems  long  afterwards  to  be  writ- 
ten by  the  author  in  exile.  Its  old  place,  therefore,  in  all  former 
editions,  at  the  end  of  the  volume  containing  the  poems  previously 
published  in  the  same  year,  is  obviously  the  only  right  one,  and 
rationally  the  only  one  possible.  By  what  inexplicable  and  incon- 
ceivable caprice  it  has  been   promoted    to   a  place  in  the  so-called 


32  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

The  lyric  work  of  these  years  would  have  been 
enough  for  the  energy  of  another  man,  for  the 
glory  of  another  poet;  it  was  but  a  part,  it  was 
(I  had  well  nigh  said)  the  lesser  part,  of  its  au- 
thor's labors — if  labor  be  not  an  improper  term  for 
the  successive  or  simultaneous  expressions  or 
effusions  of  his  indefatigable  spirit.  The  year 
after  Notre-Danic  de  Paris  and  Lcs  Feuilles 
iV Autoninc  appeared  one  of  the  great  crowning 
tragedies  of  all  time,  Le  Roi  s  amuse.  As  the 
key-note  of  Marion  de  Lorine  had  been  redemp- 
tion by  expiation,  so  the  key-note  of  this  play  is 
expiation  by  retribution.  The  simplicity,  origin- 
ality, and  straightforwardness  of  the  terrible 
means  through  which  this  austere  conception  is 
worked  out  would  give  moral  and  dramatic  value 
to  a  work  less  rich  in  the  tenderest  and  sublimest 
poetry,  less  imbued  with  the  purest  fire  of  pathet- 
ic passion.     After  the  magnificent  pleading  of  the 

edition  dcflnitii^e,  on  the  mighty  roll  of  the  Legcnde  des  Sicdes,  at 
the  head  of  the  fourth  volume  of  that  crowning  work  of  modern 
times,  I  am  hopelessly  and  heljslessly  at  a  loss  to  conjecture.  But, 
at  all  risk  of  impeachment  on  a  charge  of  unbecoming  presumption, 
I  must  and  do  here  enter  my  most  earnest  and  strenuous  protest 
against  the  claim  of  an  edition  to  be  in  any  sense  final  and  unalter- 
able, which  rejects  from  among  the  Chatiments  the  poem  on  the 
death  of  Saint- Arnaud  and  admits  into  the  Legende  des  Siecles  the 
poem  on  the  reinterment  of  Napoleon. 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  ii 

Marquis  dc  Nangis  in  the  preceding  play,  it  must 
have  seerhed  impossible  that  the  poet  should, 
without  a  touch  of  repetition  or  reiterance,  be 
able  again  to  confront  a  young  king  with  an  old 
servant,  pour  forth  again  the  denunciation  and 
appeal  of  a  breaking  heart,  clothe  again  the 
haughtiness  of  honor,  the  loyalty  of  grief,  the 
sanctity  of  indignation,  in  words  that  shine  like 
lightning  and  verses  that  thunder  like  the  sea. 
But  the  veteran  interceding  for  a  nephew's  life  is 
a  less  tragic  figure  than  he  who  comes  to  ask 
account  for  a  daughter's  honor.  Hugo  never 
merely  repeats  himself;  his  miraculous  fertility 
and  force  of  utterance  were  not  more  indefatig- 
able and  inexhaustible  than  the  fountains  of 
thought  and  emotion  which  fed  that  eloquence 
with  fire. 

In  the  seventh  scene  of  the  fourth  act  oi Marion 
de  LormCy  an  old  warrior  of  the  days  of  Henri 
Quatre  comes  to  plead  with  the  son  of  his  old 
comrade  in  arms  for  the  life  of  his  heir,  con- 
demned to  death  as  a  duelist  by  the  edict  of 
Richelieu. 

Le  Marquis  dk  Nangis  {se  relevant). 

Je  dis  qu'il  est  bien  temps  que  vous  y  songiez,  sire; 

Que  le  cardinal-due  a  de  sombres  projets, 

Et  qu'il  boit  le  meilleur  du  sang  de  vos  sujets. 


34  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO, 

Votre  pere  Henri,  de  memoire  royale, 

N'cut  pas  ainsi  livre  sa  noblesse  loyale; 

11  ne  la  frappait  point  sans  y  fort  regarder; 

Et,  bien  garde  par  elle,  ilia  savait  garden 

II  savait  qu'on  peut  fiire  avec  des  gens  d'epees 

Quelque  chose  de  mieux  que  des  tetes  coupccs; 

Qu'ils  sont  bons  a  la  guerre.     II  ne  I'ignorait  point, 

Lui  dont  plus  d  une  balle  a  troue  le  pourpoint. 

Ce  temps  eait  le  bon.     J'en  fus,  et  je  Thonore. 

Un  peu  de  seigneurie  y  palpitait  encore. 

Jamais  a  des  seigneurs  un  pretre  n'tiit  touclie. 

On  n'avait  point  alors  de  tete  a  bon  marche. 

Sire!  en    des  jours   mauvais   comme.ceux   ou    nous 

sommes, 
Croyez  un  vieux,  gardez  un  peu  de  gentilshommes. 
Vous  en  aurez  besoin  peut-etre  a  votre  tour. 
Helas  1  vous  gemirez  peut-etre  quelque  jour 
Que  la  place  de  Greve  ait  ete  si  fetee, 
Et  que  tant  de  seigneurs  de  bravoure  indomptee, 
Vers  qui  se  tourneront  vos  regrets  envieux, 
Soient  morts  depuis  longtemps  qui  ne  seraient  pas 

vieux  ! 
Car  nous  sommes  tout  chauds  de  la  guerre  civile, 
Et  le  tocsin  d'hier  gronde  encor  dans  la  ville. 
Soyez  plus  menager  des  peines  du  bourreau. 
C'est  lui  qui  doit  garder  son  estoc  au  fourreau, 
Non  pas  vous.     D'echafauds  montrez-vous  econome. 
Craignez  d'avoir  un  jour  a  pleurer  lel  brave  homme, 
Tel  vaillant  de  grand  coeur,  dont,  a  I'heure  qu'il  est, 
Le  squelette  blanchit  aux  chain cs  d'un  gibet ! 
Sire  !  le  sang  n'est  pas  une  bonne  rosee; 
Nulle  moisson  ne  vient  sur  la  Greve  arrosee, 


THE  WORK  UF  VICTOR  HUGO.  35 

Et  le  peuple  des  rois  evile  Ic  balcon, 

Quand  aux  depens  du  Louvre  on  peuple  Montfaucon. 

Meurent  les  courtisans,  s'il  faut  que  leur  voix  aille 

Vous  amuser,  pendant  que  le  bourreau  travaille  ! 

Celte  voix  des  flalteurs  qui  dit  que  tout  est  bon, 

Qu'apres  tout  on  est  fils  d'Henri  Quatre,  et  Bourbon, 

Si  haute  qu'elle  soit,  ne  couvre  pas  sans  peine 

Le  bruit  sourd  qu'en  tombant  fait  une  tcte  humaine. 

Je  vous  en  donne  avis,  ne  jouez  pas  ce  jeu, 

Roi,  qui  serez  un  jour  face  a  face  avcc  Dieu. 

Done,  je  vous  dis,  avant  que  rien  ne  s'accomplisse, 

Qu  a  tout  prendre  il  vaut  mieux  un  combat  qu'un  sup- 

plice. 
Que  ce  n'est  pas  la  joie  et  I'honneur  des  etats 
De  voir  plus  de  besogne  aux  bourreaux  qu'aux  soldats, 
Que  c'est  un  pasteur  dur  pour  la  France  o\x  vous  etes 
Qu'un  prctre  qui  se  paye  une  dime  de  tetes, 
Et  que  cet  homme  illustre  entre  les  inhumains 
Qui  touche  a  votre  sceptre — a  du  sang  a  ses  mains  I 

In  the  fifth  scene  of  the  first  act  of  Le  Roi 
s'amusc,  an  old  nobleman  whose  life,  forfeit  on  a 
charge  of  friendship  or  relationship  with  rebels, 
has  been  repurchased  by  his  daughter  from  the 
king  at  the  price  of  her  honor,  is  insulted  by 
the  king's  jester  when  he  comes  to  speak  with  the 
king,  and  speaks  thus,  without  a  glance  at  the 
jester. 

Une  insulte  de  plus  ! — Vous,  sire,  ecoutez-moi, 
Comme  vous  le  devez,  puisque  vous  etes  roi  ! 


36  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

Vous  m'avez  fait  un  jour  mener  pieds  nus  en  Greve; 

La,  vous  m'avez  fait  grace,  ainsi  que  dans  un  reve, 

Et  je  vous  ai  beni,  no  sachant  en  efifet 

Ce  qu'un  roi  cache  au  fond  d'une  grace  qu'il  fait. 

Or,  vous  aviez  cache  ma  honte  dans  la  mienne. — 

Oui,  sire,  sans  respect  pour  une  race  ancienne. 

Pour  le  sang  de  Poitiers,  noble  depuis  mille  ans, 

Tandis  que,  revenant  de  la  Greve  a  pas  lents, 

Je  priais  dans  mon  coeur  le  dieu  de  la  victoire 

Qu'il  vous  donnat  mcs  jours  de  vie  en  jours  de  gloire, 

Vous,  Fran9ois  de  Valois,  le  soir  du  meme  jour, 

Sans  crainte,  sans  pitie,  sans  pudeur,  sans  amour, 

Dans  votre  lit,  tombeau  de  la  vertu  des  femmes, 

Vous  avez  froidement,  sous  vos  baisers  infames, 

Terni,  fletri,  souille,  deshonore,  bris6 

Diane  de  Poitiers,  comtesse  de  Breze  ! 

Quoi !  lorsque  j'attendais  I'arret  qui  me  condamne, 

Tu  courais  done  au  Louvre,  6  ma  chaste  Diane  ! 

Et  lui,  ce  roi  sacre  chevalier  par  Bayard, 

Jeune  homme  auquel  il  faut  des  plaisirs  de  vieillard, 

Pour  quelques  jours  de  plus  dont  Dieu  seul  salt  le  compte, 

Ton  pcre  sous  ses  pieds,  te  marchandait  ta  honte, 

Et  cet  affreux  treteau,  chose  horrible  a.  penser  ! 

Qu'un  matin  le  bourreau  vint  en  Greve  dresser, 

Avant  la  fin  du  jour  devait  etre,  6  miserc  ! 

Ou  le  lit  de  la  fille,  ou  Techafaud  du  pere  ! 

O  Dieu  !  qui  nous  jugez  !  qu'avez-vous  dit  la-haut, 

Quand  vos  regards  ont  vu,  sur  ce  meme  echafaud, 

Se  vautrer,  tribte  et  louche,  et  sanglanle,  et  souillee. 

La  luxure  royale  en  clemence  habillee? 

Sire  !  en  faisant  cela,  vous  avez  mal  agi. 

Que  du  sang  d'un  vieillard  le  pave  fut  rougi, 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  Z7 

C'^tait  bien.     Ce  vieillard,  peut-etre  respectable, 

Le  meritait,  6tant  de  ceux  du  connetable. 

Mais  que  pour  le  vieillard  vous  ayez  pris  I'enfant, 

Que  vous  ayez  broye  sous  un  pied  triomphant 

La  pauvre  femme  en  pleurs,  a  s'effrayer  trop  prompte 

Cast  una  chose  impie,  et  dont  vous  rendrez  compte  ! 

Vous  avez  depasse  votre  droit  d'un  grand  pas. 

Le  pere  e  ait  a  vous,  mais  la  fille  non  pas. 

Ah  !   vous  m'avez  fait  grace  ! — Ah  !   vous  nommez  la 

chose 
Une  grace  !  et  je  suis  un  ingrat,  je  suppose  ! 
— Sire,  au  lieu  d'abuser  ma  fille,  bien  plutot 
Que  n'etes-vous  venu  vous-meme  en  mon  cachot, 
Je  vous  aurais  crie: — Faites-moi  mourir,  grace  ! 
Oh  !  grace  pour  ma  fille,  et  grace  pour  ma  race  1 
Oh  !  faites-moi  mourir  !  la  lombe,  et  non  raff"ront! 
Pas  de  tele  plutot  qu'une  souillure  au  front ! 
Oh  !  monseigneur  le  roi,  puisqu'ainsi  Ton  vous  nomme, 
Croyez-vous    qu'un   chretien,   um   comte,    un    gentil- 

homme, 
Soit  moins  decapite,  repondez,  monseigneur, 
Quand  au  lieu  de  la  tete  il  lui  manque  I'honneur? 
— ^J'aurais  dit  cela,  sire,  et  le  soir,  dans  leglise, 
Dans  mon  cercueil  sanglant  baisant  ma  barbe  grise, 
Ma  Diane  au  coeur  pur,  ma  fille  au  front  sacre, 
Honoree,  eut  prie  pour  son  pere  honore  1 
— Sire,  je  ne  viens  pas  redemander  ma  fille. 
Quand  on  n'a  plus  d'honneur,  on  n'a  plus  de  famille. 
Qu'elle  vous  aime  ou  non  d'un  amour  insense, 
Je  n'ai  rien  a  reprendrc  ou  la  honte  a  passe. 
Gardez-la. — Seulement  jc  mc  suis  mis  en  tote 
De  venir  vous  troubler  ainsi  dans  chaque  fete, 


38  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

Et  jusqu'a  ce  qu'un  pere,  un  frere,  ou  quelque  epoux, 
— La  chose  arrivera, — nous  ait  venges  de  vous. 
Pale,  a  tous  vos  banquets,  je  reviendrai  vous  dire: 
— Vous  avez  mal  agi,  vous  avez  mal  fait,  sire ! — 
Et  vous  m'ecouterez,  et  votre  front  terni 
Ne  se  relevera  que  quand  j'aurai  fini. 
Vous  voudrez,  pour  forcer  ma  vengeance  a  se  taire, 
Me  rendre  au  bourreau.     Non.     Vous  ne  I'oserez  faire, 
De  peur  que  ce  ne  soit  mon  spectre  qui  demain 

{Monirant  sa  teie) 
Revienne  vous  parler, — cette  tete  a  la  main  ! 

Marion  de  Lorme  had  been  prohibited  by  Charles 
the  Tenth  for  an  imaginary  reflection  on  Charles 
the  Tenth;  Le  Roi  s' amuse  was  prohibited  by 
Louis-Philippe  the  First — and  Last — for  an  imag- 
inary reflection  on  Citizen  Philippe  Egalite.  Vic- 
tor Hugo  vindicated  his  meaning  and  reclaimed 
his  rights  in  a  most  eloquent,  mo^st  manly,  and 
most  unanswerable  speech  before  a  tribunal  which 
durst  not  and  could  not  but  refuse  him  justice. 
Early  in  the  following  year  he  brought  out  the 
first  of  his  three  tragedies  in  prose — in  a  prose 
which  even  the  most  loyal  lovers  of  poetry,  Theo- 
phile  Gautier  at  their  head,  acknowledged  on  trial 
to  be  as  good  as  verse.  And  assuredly  it  would 
be,  if  any  prose  ever  could:  which  yet  I  must  con- 
fess that  I  for  one  can  never  really  feel  to  be  pos- 
sible.     Liwrece  Borgia,    the    first-born  of  these 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  39 

three,  is  also  the  most  perfect  in  structure  as  well 
as  the  most  sublime  in  subject.  The  plots  of  all 
three  are  equally  pure  inventions  of  tragic  fancy: 
Gennaro  and  Fabiano,  the  heroic  son  of  the  Bor- 
gia and  the  caitiff  lover  of  the  Tudor,  are  of  course 
as  utterly  unknown  to  history  as  is  the  self-devo- 
tion of  the  actress  Tisbe.  It  is  more  important 
to  remark  and  more  useful  to  remember  that  the 
master  of  terror  and  pity,  the  command  of  all  pas- 
sions and  all  powers  that  may  subserve  the  pur- 
pose of  tragedy,  is  equally  triumphant  and  infal- 
lible in  them  all.  Lucrccc  Borgia  and  Marie 
Tiidor  appeared  respectively  in  February  and  in 
November  of  the  year  1833;  Angela,  two  years 
later;  and  the  year  after  this  the  exquisite  and 
melodious  libretto  of  La  Esmeralda,  which  should 
be  carefully  and  lovingly  studied  by  all  who  would 
appreciate  the  all  but  superhuman  versatility  and 
dexterity  of  metrical  accomplishment  which  would 
have  sufficed  to  make  a  lesser  poet  famous  among 
his  peers  forever,  but  may  almost  escape  notice  in 
the  splendor  of  Victor  Hugo's  other  and  sublimer 
qualities.  In  his  thirty-seventh  year  all  these 
blazed  out  once  more  together  in  the  tragedy 
sometimes  apparently  rated  as  his  master-work 
by  judges  whose  verdict  would  on  any  such  ques- 


40  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

tion  be  worthy  at  least  of  all  considerate  respect. 
No  one  that  I  know  of  has  ever  been  absurd 
enough  to  make  identity  in  tone  of  thought  or 
feeling,  in  quality  of  spirit  or  of  style,  the  ground 
for  a  comparison  of  Hugo  with  Shakespeare:  they 
are  of  course  as  widely  different  as  are  their  re- 
spective countries  and  their  respective  times:  but 
never  since  the  death  of  Shakespeare  had  there 
been  so  perfect  and  harmonious  a  fusion  of  the 
highest  comedy  with  the  deepest  tragedy  as  in 
the  five  many-voiced  and  many-colored  acts  of 
Ruy  Bias. 

At  the  age  of  forty  Victor  Hugo  gave  to  the 
stage  which  for  thirteen  years  had  been  glorified 
by  his  genius  the  last  work  he  was  ever  to  write 
for  it.  There  may  perhaps  be  other  readers  be- 
sides myself  who  take  even  more  delight  in  Les 
Biirgraves  than  in  some  of  the  preceding  plays 
which  had  been  more  regular  in  action,  more 
plausible  in  story,  less  open  to  the  magnificent 
reproach  of  being  too  good  for  the  stage — as  the 
Hamlet  which  came  finally  from  the  recasting 
hand  of  Shakespeare  was  found  to  be,  in  the  judg- 
ment even  of  Shakespeare's  fellows;  too  rich  in 
lyric  beauty,  too  superb  in  epic  state.  The  pre- 
vious year  had  seen  the  publication  of  the  marvel- 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  4t 

lously  eloquent,  copious,  and  vivid  letters  which 
gave  to  the  world  the  impressions  received  by  its 
greatest  poet  in  a  tour  on  the  Rhine  made  five 
years  earlier — that  is,  in  the  year  o{  Riiy  Bias .  In 
this  book,  as  Gautier  at  once  observed,  the  inspi- 
ration of  Les  Biirgraves  is  evidently  and  easily 
traceable.  Among  numberless  masterpieces  of 
description,  from  which  I  have  barely  time  to 
select  for  mention  the  view  of  Bishop  Hatto's 
tower  by  the  appropriately  Dantesque  light  of  a 
furnace  at  midnight — not  as  better  than  others, 
but  as  an  example  of  the  magic  by  which  the  wri- 
ter imbues  and  impregnates  observation  and  re- 
collection with  feeling  and  with  fancy — the  most 
enchanting  legend  of  enchantment  ever  written 
for  children  of  all  ages,  sweet  and  strange  enough 
to  have  grown  up  among  the  fairy  tales  of  the 
past  whose  only  known  authors  are  the  winds  and 
suns  of  their  various  climates,  lurks  like  a  flower 
in  a  crevice  of  a  crumbling  fortress.  The  entranc- 
ing and  haunting  beauty  of  Regina's  words  as 
she  watches  the  departing  swallows — words  which 
it  may  seem  that  any  one  might  have  said,  but  to 
which  none  other  could  have  given  the  accent 
and  the  effect  that  Hugo  has  thrown  into  the  sim- 
ple sound  of  them — was  as  surely  derived,  we  can- 


42  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

not  but  think,  from  some  such  milder  and  brighter 
vision  of  the  remembered  Rhineland  solitudes,  as 
were  the  subHme  and  all  but  /Eschylean  impreca- 
tions of  Guanhumara  from  the  impression  of  their 
darker  and  more  savage  memories  or  landscapes. 
Otbert  {ltd  moiitrant  lafenetre). 
Voyez  ce  beau  soleil  ! 

Regina. 

Oui,  le  couchant  s'enflamme. 
Nous  sommes  en  automne  et  nous  sommes  au  soir. 
Partout  la  feuille  tombe  et  le  l)ois  devient  noir. 

Otbert. 
Les  feuilles  renaitront. 

Regina. 

Oui. 

{Revant  et  regardant  le  del. ) 

Vite  !  a  tire-d'ailes  ! — 
— Oh  !  c'est  triste  de  voir  s'enfuir  les  hirondelles  ! — 
Elles  s'en  vont  la-bas,  vers  le  midi  dore. 

Otbert. 

Elles  reviendront. 

Regina. 
Oui. — Mais  moi  je  ne  verrai 
Ni  I'oiseau  revenir  ni  la  feuille  renaitre  ! 

Two  years  before  the  appearance  of  Les  Bur- 
graves  Victor  Hugo  had  begun  his  long  and  glo- 
rious career  as  an  orator  by  a  speech  of  character- 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  43 

istically  generous  enthusiasm,  delivered  on  his 
reception  into  the  Academy.  The  forgotten  play- 
wright and  versifier  whom  he  succeeded  had  been 
a  professional  if  not  a  personal  enemy:  the  one 
memorable  thing  about  the  man  was  his  high- 
minded  opposition  to  the  tyranny  of  Napoleon, 
his  own  personal  friend  before  the  epoch  of  that 
tyranny  began:  and  this  was  the  point  at  once 
seized  and  dwelt  on  by  the  orator  in  a  tone  of 
earnest  and  cordial  respect.  The  fiery  and  rap- 
turous eloquence  with  which,  at  the  same  time,  he 
celebrated  the  martial  triumphs  of  the  empire, 
gave  ample  proof  that  he  was  now,  as  his  father 
had  prophesied  that  his  mother's  royalist  boy 
would  become  when  he  grew  to  be  a  man,  a  con- 
vert to  the  views  of  that  father,  a  distinguished 
though  ill-requited  soldier  of  the  empire,  and  a 
faithful  champion  or  mourner  of  its  cause.  The 
stage  of  Napoleonic  hero-worship,  single-minded 
and  single-eyed  if  short-sighted  and  misdirected, 
through  which  Victor  Hugo  was  still  passing  on 
towards  the  unseen  prospect  of  a  better  faith,  had 
been  vividly  illustrated  and  vehemently  proclaim- 
ed in  his  letters  on  the  Rhine,  and  was  hereafter 
to  be  described  with  a  fervent  and  pathetic  fidel- 
ity in  a  famous  chapter  of  Les  Miserablcs.     The 


44  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

same  phase  of  patriotic  prepossession  inspired  his 
no  less  generous  tribute  to  the  not  very  radiant 
memory  of  Casimir  Delavigne,  to  whom  he  paid 
likewise  the  last  and  crowning  honor  of  a  funeral 
oration:  an  honor  afterwards  conferred  on  Fred- 
eric Soulie,  and  far  more  deservedly  bestowed  on 
Honore  de  Balzac.  More  generous  his  first  poli- 
tical speech  in  the  chamber  of  peers  could  not  be, 
but  there  was  more  of  reason  and  justice  in  its 
fruitless  appeal  for  more  than  barren  sympathy, 
for  a  moral  though  not  material  intervention,  on 
behalf  of  Poland  in  1846.  His  second  speech  as  a 
peer  is  an  edifying  commentary  on  the  vulgar 
English  view  of  his  character  as  defective  in  all 
the  practical  and  rational  qualities  of  a  politician, 
a  statesman,  or  a  patriot.  The  subject  was  the 
consolidation  and  defence  of  the  French  coast- 
line: a  poet,  of  course,  according  to  all  reasonable 
tradition,  if  he  ventured  to  open  his  unserviceable 
lips  at  all  on  such  a  grave  matter  of  public  busi- 
ness, ought  to  have  remembered  what  was  expect- 
ed of  him  by  the  sagacity  of  blockheads,  and 
carefully  confined  himself  to  the  clouds,  leaving 
facts  to  take  care  of  thenr.selves  and  proofs  to 
hang  floating  in  the  air,  while  his  vague  and  ver- 
bose declamation  wandered  at  its  own  sweet  will 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  45 

about  and  about  the  matter  in  hand,  and  never 
came  close  enough  to  grapple  it.  This,  I  regret 
to  say,  is  exactly  what  the  greatest  poet  of  his 
age  was  inconsiderate  enough  to  avoid,  and  most 
markedly  to  abstain  from  doing;  a  course  of  con- 
duct which  can  only  be  attributed  to  his  notori- 
ous and  deplorable  love  of  paradox.  His  speech, 
though  not  wanting  in  eloquence  of  a  reserved 
and  masculine  order,  was  wholly  occupied  with 
sedate  and  business-like  exposition  of  facts  and 
suggestion  of  remedies,  grounded  on  experience 
and  study  of  the  question,  and  resulting  in  a  pro- 
posal at  once  scientific  and  direct  for  such  re- 
search as  might  result,  if  possible,  in  an  arrest 
of  the  double  danger  with  which  the  coast  was 
threatened  by  the  advance  of  the  Atlantic  and 
the  Channel  to  a  gradual  obstruction  of  the  great 
harbors  and  by  the  withdrawal  or  subsidence  of 
the  Mediterranean  from  the  seaports  of  the  south; 
finally,  the  orator  urged  upon  his  audience  as  a 
crowning  necessity  the  creation  of  fresh  harbors 
of  refuge  in  dangerous  and  neglected  j^arts  of  the 
coast;  insisting,  with  a  simple  and  serious  energy 
somewhat  unlike  the  imaginary  tone  of  the  typi- 
cal or  traditional  poet,  on  the  plain  fact  that 
ninety-two  ships  had  been  lost  on  the  same  part 


4  6  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

of  the  coast  within  a  space  of  seven  years,  which 
might  have  been  saved  by  the  existence  of  a  har- 
bor of  refuge.  To  an  Olympian  or  a  Nephelo- 
coccygian  intelligence  such  a  paltry  matter  should 
have  been  even  more  indifferent  than  the  claim  of 
a  family  of  exiles  on  the  compassion  of  the  coun- 
try which  had  expelled  them.  To  my  own  more 
humble  and  homely  understanding  it  seems  that 
there  are  not  many  more  significant  or  memora- 
ble facts  on  record  in  the  history  of  our  age  than 
this:  that  Victor  Hugo  was  the  advocate  whose 
pleading  brought  back  to  France  the  banished  race 
of  which  the  future  representative  was  for  upwards 
of  twenty  years  to  keep  him  in  banishment  from 
France.  On  the  evening  of  the  same  day  on  which 
the  house  of  peers  had  listened  to  his  speech  in 
behalf  of  the  Bonaparte  family,  Louis-Philippe, 
having  taken  cognizance  of  it,  expressed  his  in- 
tention to  authorize  the  return  of  the  brood  whose 
chief  was  hereafter  to  pick  the  pockets  of  his 
children.  In  the  first  fortnight  of  the  following 
year  the  future  author  of  the  terrible  Vision  of 
Dante  saluted  in  words  full  of  noble  and  fervent 
reverence  the  apostle  of  Italian  resurrection  and 
Italian  unity  in  the  radiant  figure  of  Pope  Pius 
the  Ninth.     When  the  next  month's  revolution 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  47 

had  flung  Louis-Philippe  from  his  throne,  Victor 
Hugo  decHned  to  offer  himself  to  the  electors  as 
a  candidate  for  a  seat  in  the  assembly  about  to 
undertake  the  charge  of  framing  a  constitution 
for  the  commonwealth;  but,  if  summoned  by  his 
fellow-citizens  to  take  his  share  of  this  task,  he 
expressed  himself  ready  to  discharge  the  duty  so 
imposed  on  him  with  the  disinterested  self-devo- 
tion of  which  his  whole  future  career  was  to  give 
such  continuous  and  such  austere  evidence.  From 
the  day  on  which  sixty  thousand  voices  summon- 
ed him  to  redeem  this  pledge,  he  never  stinted 
nor  slackened  his  efforts  to  fulfil  the  charge  he 
had  accepted  in  the  closing  words  of  a  short,  sim- 
ple, and  earnest  address,  in  which  he  placed  before 
his  electors  the  contrasted  likenesses  of  two  differ- 
ent republics;  one,  misnamed  a  commonweal,  the 
rule  of  the  red  flag,  of  barbarism  and  blindness, 
communism  and  proscription  and  revenge;  the 
other  a  commonwealth  indeed,  in  which  all  rights 
should  be  respected  and  no  duties  evaded  or 
ignored;  a  government  of  justice  and  mercy,  of 
practicable  principles  and  equitable  freedom,  of 
no  iniquitous  traditions  and  no  Utopian  aims.  To 
establish  this  kind  of  commonwealth  and  prevent 
the  resurrection  of  the  other,  Hugo,  at  the  age  of 


48  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

forty-six,  professed  himself  ready  to  devote  his 
Hfe.  The  work  of  thirty-seven  years  is  now  before 
all  men's  eyes  for  proof  how  well  this  promise  has 
been  kept.  On  dangerous  questions  of  perverse 
or  perverted  socialism  (June  20,  1848),  on  the  free- 
dom of  the  press,  on  the  state  of  siege,  its  tempo- 
rary necessity  and  its  imminent  abuse,  on  the  en- 
couragement of  letters  and  the  freedom  of  the 
stage,  he  spoke,  in  the  course  of  a  few  months, 
with  what  seems  to  my  poor  understanding  the 
most  admirable  good  sense  and  temperance,  the 
most  perfect  moderation  and  loyalty.  I  venture 
to  dwell  upon  this  division  of  Hugo's  life  and 
labors  with  as  little  wish  of  converting  as  I  could 
have  hope  to  convert  that  large  majority  whose 
verdict  has  established  as  a  law  of  nature  the  fact 
or  the  doctrine  that  "  every  poet  is  a  fool  "  when 
he  meddles  with  practical  politics;  but  not  with- 
out a  confidence  grounded  on  no  superficial  study 
that  the  maintainers  of  this  opinion,  if  they  wish 
to  cite  in  support  of  it  the  evidence  supplied  by 
Victor  Hugo's  political  career,  will  do  well  to  per- 
severe in  the  course  which  I  will  do  them  the 
justice  to  admit  that — as  far  as  I  know — they 
have  always  hitherto  adopted;  in  other  words,  to 
assume  the  universal  assent  of  all   persons  worth 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  49 

mentioning  to  the  accuracy  of  this  previous  as- 
sumption, and  dismiss  with  a  quiet  smile  or  an 
open  sneer  the  impossible  notion  that  any  one  but 
some  single  imbecile  or  eccentric  can  pretend  to 
take  seriously  what  seems  to  them  ridiculous,  or 
to  think  that  ridiculous  which  to  their  wiser  minds 
commends  itself  as  serious.  This  beaten  road  of 
assumption,  this  well-worn  highway  of  assertion, 
is  a  safe  as  well  as  a  simple  line  of  travel:  and  the 
practical  person  who  keeps  to  it  can  well  afford 
to  dispense  with  argument  as  palpably  superflu- 
ous, and  with  evidence  as  obviously  impertinent. 
Should  he  so  far  forget  that  great  principle  of  pre- 
caution as  to  diverge  from  it  into  the  modest  and 
simple  course  of  investigation  and  comparison  of 
theory  with  fact  and  probability  with  proof,  his 
task  may  be  somewhat  harder,  and  its  result  some- 
what less  satisfactory.  I  would  not  advise  any 
but  an  honest  and  candid  believer  in  the  theory 
which  identifies  genius  with  idiocy — which  at  all 
events  would  practically  define  one  special  form 
of  genius  as  a  note  of  general  idiocy — to  study  the 
speeches  (they  are  nine  in  number,  including  two 
brief  and  final  replies  to  the  personal  attacks  of 
one  Montalembert,  whose  name  used  to  be  rather 
popular  among  a  certain  class  of  English  journal- 


50  A  STUDF  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

ists  as  that  of  a  practical  worshipper  of  their  great 
god  Compromise,  and  a  professional  enemy  of  all 
tyranny  or  villainy  that  was  not  serviceable  and 
obsequious  to  his  Church) — to  study,  I  say,  the 
speeches  delivered  by  Victor  Hugo  in  the  Legis- 
lative Assembly  during  a  space  of  exactly  two 
years  and  eight  days.  The  first  of  these  speeches 
dealt  with  the  question  of  what  in  England  we 
call  pauperism — with  the  possibility,  the  necessity, 
and  the  duty  of  its  immediate  relief  and  its  ulti- 
mate removal:  the  second,  with  the  infamous  and 
inexpiable  crime  which  diverted  against  the  Ro- 
man republic  an  expedition  sent  out  under  the 
plea  of  protecting  Rome  against  the  atrocities  of 
Austrian  triumph.  A  double-faced  and  double- 
dealing  law,  which  under  the  name  or  the  mask 
of  free  education  aimed  at  securing  for  clerical 
instruction  a  monopoly  of  public  support  and  na- 
tional encouragement,  was  exposed  and  denounced 
by  Hugo  in  a  speech  which  insisted  no  less  earn- 
estly and  eloquently  on  the  spiritual  duty  and  the 
spiritual  necessity  of  faith  and  hope  than  on  the 
practical  necessity  and  duty  of  vigilant  resistance 
to  priestly  pretention,  and  vigilant  exposure  of 
ecclesiastical  hypocrisy  and  reactionary  intrigue. 
Against  "  the  dry  guillotine  "  of  imprisonment  in 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  51 

a  tropical  climate  added  to  transportation  for  po- 
litical offences,  the  whole  eloquence  of  a  heart  as 
great  as  his  genius  was  poured  forth  in  fervor  of 
indignation  and  pity,  of  passion  and  reason  com- 
bined. The  next  trick  of  the  infamous  game 
played  by  the  conspirators  against  the  common- 
wealth, who  were  now  beginning  to  show  their 
hand,  was  the  mutilation  of  the  suffrage.  To  this 
again  Victor  Hugo  opposed  the  same  steadfast 
front  of  earnest  and  rational  resistance;  and  yet 
again  to  the  sidelong  attack  of  the  same  political 
gang  on  the  existing  freedom  of  the  press.  A 
year  and  eight  days  elapsed  before  the  delivery 
of  his  next  and  last  great  speech  in  the  Assem- 
bly which  he  would  fain  have  saved  from  the 
shame  and  ruin  then  hard  at  hand — the  harvest 
of  its  own  unprincipled  infatuation.  The  fruit  of 
conspiracy,  long  manured  with  fraud  and  false- 
hood and  all  the  furtive  impurities  of  intrigue, 
was  now  ripe  even  to  rottenness,  and  ready  to 
fall  into  the  hands  already  stretched  towards  it — 
into  the  lips  yet  open  to  protest  that  no  one — the 
accuser  himself  must  know  it — that  no  one  was 
dreaming  of  a  second  French  empire.  All  that 
reason  and  indignation,  eloquence  and  argurnent, 
loyalty  and  sincerity  could  do  to  save  the  com- 

STROUDSDURG  PUBLIC 
MONROE  COUNTY  LBRARY 


52  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

monwealth  from  destruction  and  the  country  from 
disgrace,  was  done:  how  utterly  in  vain  is  matter 
of  history — of  one  among  the  darkest  pages  in  the 
roll  of  its  criminal  records.  The  voice  of  truth 
and  honor  was  roared  and  hooted  down  by  the 
faction  whose  tactics  would  have  discredited  a  den 
of  less  dishonest  and  more  barefaced  thieves;  the 
stroke  of  state  was  ready  for  striking;  and  the 
orator's  next  address  was  the  utterance  of  an 
exile. 

There  are  not,  even  in  the  whole  work  of  Vic- 
tor Hugo,  many  pages  of  deeper  and  more  pa- 
thetic interest  than  those  which  explain  to  us 
"  what  exile  is."  Each  of  the  three  prefaces 
to  the  three  volumes  of  his  Actes  et  Paroles  is 
rich  in  living  eloquence,  in  splendid  epigram  and 
description,  narrative  and  satire  and  study  of  men 
and  things:  but  the  second,  it  seems  to  me,  would 
still  be  first  in  attraction,  if  it  had  no  other  claim 
than  this,  that  it  contains  the  record  of  the  death 
of  Captain  Harvey.  No  reverence  for  innocent 
and  heroic  suffering,  no  abhorrence  of  triumphant 
and  execrable  crime,  can  impede  or  interfere  with 
our  sense  of  the  incalculable  profit,  the  measure- 
less addition  to  his  glory  and  our  gain,  resulting 
from  Victor  Hugo's  exile  of  nineteen  years  and 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  53 

nine  months.  Greater  already  than  all  other  poets 
of  his  time  together,  these  years  were  to  make 
him  greater  than  any  but  the  very  greatest  of  all 
time.  His  first  task  was  of  course  the  discharge 
of  a  direct  and  practical  duty;  the  record  or  regis- 
tration of  the  events  he  had  just  witnessed,  the 
infliction  on  the  principal  agent  in  them  of  the 
simple  and  immediate  chastisement  consisting  in 
the  delineation  of  his  character  and  the  recapitu- 
lation of  his  work.  There  would  seem  to  be 
among  modern  Englishmen  an  impression — some- 
what singular,  it  appears  to  me,  ia  a  race  which 
professes  to  hold  in  sjoccial  reverence  a  book  so 
dependent  for  its  arguments  and  its  effects  on  a 
continuous  appeal  to  conscience  and  emotion  as 
the  Bible — that  the  presence  of  passion,  be  it 
never  so  righteous,  so  rational,  so  inevitable  by 
any  one  not  ignoble  or  insane,  implies  the  absence 
of  reason;  that  such  indignation  as  inflamed  the 
lips  of  Elijah  with  prophecy,  and  armed  the  hand 
of  Jesus  with  a  scourge,  is  a  sign — except  of  course 
in  Palestine  of  old — that  the  person  affected  by 
this  kind  of  moral  excitement  must  needs  be  a 
lunatic  of  the  sentimental  if  not  rather  of  the 
criminal  type.  The  main  facts  recorded  in  the 
pages  of  Napoleon  Ic  Petit  and  L Histoire  d'un 


54  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

Crime  are  simple,  flagrant,  palpable,  indisputable. 
The  man  who  takes  any  other  view  of  them  than 
is  expressed  in  these  two  books  must  be  prepared 
to  impugn  and  to  confute  the  principle  that  per- 
jury, robbery,  and  Imurder  are  crimes.  But,  we 
are  told,  the  perpetual  vehemence  of  incessant 
imprecation,  the  stormy  insistence  of  unremitting 
obloquy,  which  accompanies  every  chapter,  illu- 
minates every  page,  underlines  every  sentence  of 
the  narrative,  must  needs  impair  the  confidence 
of  an  impartial  reader  in  the  trustworthiness  of  a 
chronicle  and  a  commentary  written  throughout 
as  in  characters  of  flaming  fire.  Englishmen  are, 
proud  to  prefer  a  more  temperate,  a  more  practi- 
cal, a  more  sedate  form  of  political  or  controver- 
sial eloquence.  When  I  remember  and  consider 
certain  examples  of  popular  oratory  and  contro- 
versy now  flagrant  and  flourishing  among  us,  I 
am  tempted  to  doubt  the  exact  accuracy  of  this 
undoubtedly  plausible  proposition:  but,  be  that  as 
it  may,  I  must  take  leave  to  doubt  yet  more  em- 
phatically the  implied  conclusion  that  the  best  or 
the  only  good  witness  procurable  on  a  question 
of  right  and  wrong  is  one  too  impartial  to  feel 
enthusiasm  or  indignation;  that  indifference  alike 
to  good  and  evil  is  the  sign  of  perfect  equity  and 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  55 

trustworthiness  in  a  judge  of  moral  or  political 
questions;  that  a  man  who  has  witnessed  a  de- 
liberate massacre  of  unarmed  men,  women,  and 
children,  if  he  be  indiscreet  enough  to  describe 
his  experience  in  any  tone  but  that  of  a  scientific 
or  aesthetic  serenity,  forfeits  the  inherent  right 
of  a  reasonable  and  an  honorable  man  to  com- 
mand a  respectful  and  attentive  hearing  from  all 
honorable  and  reasonable  men. 

But  valuable  and  precious  as  all  such  readers 
will  always  hold  these  two  book  of  immediate  and 
implacable  history,  they  will  not,  I  presume,  be 
rated  among  the  more  important  labors  of  their 
author's  literary  life.  No  one  who  would  know 
fully  or  would  estimate  aright  the  greatest  genius 
born  into  the  world  in  our  nineteenth  century  can 
afford  to  pass  them  by  with  less  than  careful  and 
sympathetic  study  :  for  without  moral  sympathy 
no  care  will  enable  a  student  to  form  any  but  a 
trivial  and  a  frivolous  judgment  on  writings  which 
make  their  primary  appeal  to  the  conscience — to 
the  moral  instinct  and  the  moral  intelligence  of 
the  reader.  They  may  perhaps  not  improperly 
be  classed,  for  historic  or  biographic  interest,  with 
the  Littcrature  ct  PJiilosopJiie  melees  which  had 
been  given  to  the  world  in  1834.     From  the  crud- 


56  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

est  impressions  of  the  boy  to  the  ripest  convic- 
tions of  the  man,  one  common  quaHty  informs  and 
harmonizes  every  stage  of  thought,  every  phase 
of  feeHng,  every  change  of  spiritual  outlook,  which 
has  left  its  mark  on  the  writings  of  which  that 
collection  is  composed;  the  quality  of  a  pure,  a 
perfect,  an  intense  and  burning  sincerity.  Apart 
from  this  personal  interest  which  informs  them  all, 
two  at  least  are  indispensable  to  any  serious  and 
thorough  study  of  Hugo's  work:  the  fervent  and 
reiterated  intercession  on  behalf  of  the  worse  than 
neglected  treasures  of  mediaeval  architecture  then 
delivered  over  for  a  prey  to  the  claws  of  the  de- 
stroyer and  the  paws  of  the  restorer;  the  superb 
essay  on  Mirabeau,  which  remains  as  a  landmark 
or  a  tidemark  in  the  history  of  his  opinions  and 
the  development  of  his  powers.  But  the  highest 
expression  of  these  was  not  to  be  given  in  prose — 
not  even  in  the  prose  of  Victor  Hugo. 

There  is  not,  it  seems  to  me,  in  all  this  marvel- 
lous life,  to  which  well  nigh  every  year  brought 
its  additional  aureole  of  glory,  a  point  more  im- 
portant, a  date  more  memorable,  than  the  publi- 
cation of  the  C/za/'/wcvz/j-.  Between  the  prologue 
Night  and  the  epilogue  Light  the  ninety-eight 
poems  that  roll  and  break  and  lighten  and  thun- 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  57 

dcr  like  waves  of  a  visible  sea  fulfil  the  choir  of 
their  crescent  and  refluent  harmonies  with  hardly 
less  depth  and  change  and  strength  of  music,  with 
no  less  living  force  and  with  no  less  passionate 
unity,  than  the  waters  on  whose  shores  they  were 
written.  Two  poems,  the  third  and  the  sixth,  in 
the  first  of  the  seven  books  into  which  the  collec- 
tion is  divided,  may  be  taken  as  immediate  and 
sufficient  instances  of  the  two  different  keys  in 
which  the  entire  book  is  written;  of  the  two  \ 
styles,  one  bitterly  and  keenly  realistic,  keeping 
scornfully  close  to  shameful  fact — one  higher  in 
flight  and  wider  in  range  of  outlook,  soaring 
strongly  to  the  very  summits  of  lyric  passion — 
which  alternate  in  terrible  and  sublime  antiphony 
throughout  the  living  pages  of  this  imperishable 
record.  A  second  Juvenal  might  have  drawn  for 
us  with  not  less  of  angry  fidelity  and  superb  dis- 
gust the  ludicrous  and  loathsome  inmates  of  the 
den  infested  by  holy  hirelings  of  the  clerical  press; 
no  Roman  satirist  could  have  sung,  no  Roman 
lyrist  could  have  thundered,  such  a  poem  as  that 
which  has  blasted  for  ever  the  name  and  the 
memory  of  the  prostitute  archbishop  Sibour.  The 
poniard  of  the  priest  who  struck  him  dead  at  the 
altar  he  had  desecrated  struck  a  blow   less  deep 


58  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

and  deadly  than  had  been  dealt  already  on  the 
renegade  pander  of  a  far  more  infamous  assassin. 
The  next  poem  is  a  notable  and  remarkable  ex- 
ample of  the  fusion  sometimes  accomplished — or, 
if  this  be  thought  a  phrase  too  strong  for  accur- 
acy, of  the  middle  note  sometimes  touched,  of  the 
middle  way  sometimes  taken — between  the  pure- 
ly lyric  and  the  purely  satiric  style  or  method. 
But  it  would  be  necessary  to  dwell  on  every 
poem,  to  pause  at  every  page,  if  adequate  justice 
were  to  be  done  to  this  or  indeed  to  any  of  the 
volumes  of  verse  published  from  this  time  forth  by 
Victor  Hugo.  I  will  therefore,  not  without  se- 
rious diffidence,  venture  once  more  to  indicate  by 
selection  such  poems  as  seem  to  me  most  es- 
pecially notable  among  the  greatest  even  of 
these.  In  Lhc  first  book,  besides  the  three  already 
mentioned,  I  take  for  examples  the  solemn  utter- 
ance of  indignant  mourning  addressed  to  the 
murdered  dead  of  the  fourth  of  December;  the 
ringing  song  in  praise  of  art  which  ends  in  a  note 
of  noble  menace;  the  scornful  song  that  follows 
it,  with  a  burden  so  majestic  in  its  variations;  the 
fearful  and  faithful  "  map  of  Europe"  in  1852,  with 
its  closing  word  of  witness  for  prophetic  hope  and 
faith;  and  the  simple  perfection  of  pathos  in  the 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  59 

song  of  the  little  forsaken  birds  and  lambs  and 
children.  In  the  second  book,  the  appeal  "To 
the  People,"  with  a  threefold  cry  for  burden,  call- 
ing on  the  buried  Lazarus  to  rise  again  in  words 
that  seem  to  reverberate  from  stanza  to  stanza 
like  peal  upon  peal  of  living  thunder,  prolonged 
in  steadfast  cadence  from  height  to  height  across 
the  hollows  of  a  range  of  mountains,  is  one  of  the 
most  wonderful  symphonies  of  tragic  and  trium- 
phant verse  that  ever  shook  the  hearts  of  its 
hearers  with  rapture  of  rage  and  pity.  The  first 
and  the  two  last  stanzas  seem  to  me  absolutely 
unsurpassed  and  unsurpassable  for  pathetic  majes- 
ty of  music. 

Partout  pleurs,  sanglots,  oris  funebres. 

Pourquoi  dors-lu  dans  les  tenebres  ? 

Je  ne  vcux  pas  que  tu  sois  mort. 

Pourquoi  dors-tu  dans  les  tenebres  } 

Ce  n'est  pas  Tinstant  ou  Ton  dort. 
La  pale  Liberie  ^it  sanglante  a  ta  porte. 

Tu  le  sais,  toi  mort,  elle  est  morte. 

Voici  le  chacal  sur  ton  seuil, 

Voici  les  rats  et  les  belettes, 
Pourquoi  t'es-tu  laisse  Her  de  bandelettes  .? 

lis  te  mordent  dans  ton  cerceuil  ! 

De  tons  les  peuples  on  prepare 
Le  convoi  ,   .   . — 

Lazare!  Lazarc!  Lazare  ! 
Levc-toi  ! 


6o  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 


lis  batissent  des  prisons  neuves; 

O  dormeur  sombre,  entends  les  fleuves 

Miirmurer,  teints  de  sang  vermeil; 

Entends  pleurer  les  pauvres  veuves, 

O  noir  dormeur  au  dur  sommeil  ! 
Martyrs,  adieu!  le  vent  souffle,  les  pontons  flottent, 

Les  meres  au  front  gris  sanglotent; 

Leurs  fils  sont  en  proie  aux  vainqueurs; 

Elles  gemissent  sur  la  route; 
Les  pleurs  qui  de  leursyeuxs'echappentgoutteagoutte 

Filtrent  en  haine  dans  nos  coeurs. 

Les  juifs  triomphent,  groupe  avare 
Et  sans  foi  .  .  . — 

Lazare!  Lazare  Lazare  ! 
Leve-toi  ! 

Mais,  il  semble  qu'on  se  reveille  ! 

Est-ce  toi  que  j'ai  dans  I'oreille, 

Bourdonnement  du  sombre  essaim  ? 

Dans  la  ruche  frcmit  I'abeille; 

J'entends  sourdre  un  vague  tocsin. 
Les  cesars,  oubliant  qu'il  est  des  gemonies, 

S'endorment  dans  les  symphonies, 

Du  lac  Baltique  au  mont  Etna; 

Les  peuples  sont  dans  la  nuit  noire; 
Dormez,  rois;  le  clairon  dit  aux  tyrans:  victoire  1 

Et  I'orgue  leur  chante;  hosanna  ! 

Qui  repond  a  cette  fanfare  ? 

Le  beffroi  .  .  . — 

Lazare!   Lazare!  Lazare  ! 
Leve-toi  1 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  6i 

If  ever  a  more  superb  structure  of  lyric  verse  was 
devised  by  the  brain  of  man,  it  must  have  been, 
I  am  very  certain,  in  a  language  utterly  unknown 
to  me.  Every  line,  every  pause,  every  note  of  it 
should  be  studied  and  restudied  by  those  who 
would  thoroughly  understand  the  lyrical  capacity 
of  Hugo's  at  its  very  highest  point  of  power,  in 
the  fullest  sweetness  of  its  strength. 

About  the  next  poem — '  Souvenir  de  la  nuit  du 
4' — others  may  try,  if  they  please,  to  write,  if  they 
can;  I  can  only  confess  that  I  cannot.  Nothing 
so  intolerable  in  its  pathos,  I  should  think,  was 
ever  written. 

The  stately  melody  of  the  stanzas  in  which  the 
exile  salutes  in  a  tone  of  severe  content  the  sor- 
rows that  environ  and  the  comforts  that  sustain 
him,  the  island  of  his  refuge,  the  sea-birds  and 
the  sea-rocks  and  the  sea,  closes  aptly  with  yet 
another  thought  of  the  mothers  weeping  for  their 
children. 

Puisque  le  juste  est  dans  I'abime, 
Puisqu'on  donne  le  sceptre  au  crime, 
Puisque  tons  les  droits  sont  trabis, 
Puisque  les  plus  fiers  restent  mornes, 
Puisqu'on  affiche  au  coin  des  homes 
Le  deshonneur  de  men  pays  ; 


62  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

O  Republique  de  nos  peres, 
Grand  Pantheon  plein  de  lumieres, 
Dome  d'or  dans  le  libre  azur, 
Temple  des  ombres  immoitelles, 
Puisqu'on  vient  avec  des  6chelles 
Coller  I'empire  sur  ton  mur  ; 

Puisque  toute  ame  est  affaiblie, 
Puisqu'on  rampe,  puisqu'on  oublie 
Le  vrai,  le  pur,  le  grand,  le  beau, 
Les  yeux  indignes  de  I'liistoire, 
L'honneur,  la  loi,  le  droit,  la  gloire, 
Et  ceux  qui  sont  dans  le  tombeau  ; 

Je  t'aime,  exil!  douleur,  je  t'aime  1 
Tristesse,  sois  mon  diademe  ! 
Je  t'aime,  altiere  pauvrete  ! 
J'aime  ma  porte  aux  vents  battue. 
J'aime  le  deuil,  grave  statue 
Qui  vient  s'asseoir  a  mon  cote. 

J'aime  le  malheur  qui  m  eprouve, 

Et  cette  ombre  ou  je  vous  retrouve, 

O  vous  a  qui  mon  coeur  sourit, 

Dignite,  foi,  vertu  voilee, 

Toi,  liberte,  fiere  exilee, 

Et  toi,  devouement,  grand  proscrit ! 

J'aime  cette  lie  solitaire, 
Jersey,  que  la  libre  Angleterre 
Couvre  de  son  vieux  pavilion, 
L'eau  noire,  par  moments  accrue, 
Le  navire,  errante  charrue, 
Le  flot,  myst6rieux  sillon. 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  63 

J'aime  ta  mouette,  6  mcr  profonde, 
Qui  secoue  en  perles  ton  onde 
Sur  son  aile  aux  fauves  couleurs, 
Plonge  dans  les  lames  geantes. 
El  sort  de  ces  gueules  beantes 
Comme  Tame  sort  des  douleurs. 

J'aime  la  roche  solennelle 
D'ou  j'entends  la  plaintc  eternelle, 
Sans  treve  comme  le  remords, 
Toujours  renaissant  dans  les  ombres, 
Des  vagues  sur  les  ecueils  sombres, 
Des  meres  sur  leurs  enfants  morts. 

The  close  of  the  third  poem  in  the  fourth  book  is 
a  nobler  protest  than  ever  has  been  uttered  or 
ever  can  be  uttered  in  prose  against  the  servile 
sophism  of  a  false  democracy  which  affirms  or 
allows  that  a  people  has  the  divine  right  of  voting 
itself  into  bondage.  There  is  nothing  grander  in 
Juvenal,  and  nothing  more  true. 

Ce  droit,  sachez-le  bien,  chiens  du  berger  Maupas, 
Et  la  France  et  le  peuple  eux-memes  ne  I'ont  pas. 
L'altiere  Verite  jamais  ne  tombe  en  cendre. 
La  Liberie  n'est  pas  une  guenille  a  vendre, 
Jelee  au  tas,  pendue  au  clou  chez  un  fripier. 
Quand  un  peuple  se  laisse  au  piege  estropier, 
Le  droit  sacre,  toujours  a  soi-meme  fidele, 
Dans  chaque  citoyen  trouve  une  citadelle  ; 
On  s'illustre  en  bravant  un  lache  conquerant, 
Et  le  moindre  du  peuple  en  devient  le  plus  grand. 


64  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

Done,  trouvez  du  bonheur,  6  plates  creatures, 

A  vivre  dans  la  fange  et  dans  les  pourritures, 

Adorez  ce  fumier  sous  ce  dais  de  brocart, 

L'honnete  homme  recule  et  s'accoude  a  I'ecart. 

Dans  la  chute  d'autrui  je  ne  veux  pas  descend  re. 

L'honneur  n'abdique  point.  Nul  n'a  droit  dc  me  prendre 

Ma  liberie,  mon  bien,  mon  ciel  bleu,  mon  amour. 

Tout  I'univers  aveugle  est  sans  droit  sur  le  jour. 

Fut  on  cent  millions  d'esclaves,  jj  suis  libre. 

Ainsi  parle  Caton.     Sur  la  Seine  ou  le  Tibre, 

Personne  n'est  tombe  tant  qu'un  seul  est  debout. 

Le  vieux  sang  des  aieux  qui  s'indigne  et  qui  bout, 

La  verlu,  la  fierte,  la  justice,  Thisioire, 

Toute  une  nation  avec  toute  sa  gloire 

Vit  dans  le  dernier  front  qui  ne  veut  pas  plier. 

Pour  soutenir  le  temple  il  suffit  d'un  pdier  ; 

\5\\  fran^ais,  c'est  la  France;  un  romain  contieni  Rome, 

Et  ce  qui  briseun  peuple  avorte  auxpieds  d'un  homme. 

The  sixth  and  seventh  poem  3  in  this  book  are 
each  a  superb  example  of  its  kind;  the  verses  on 
an  interview  between  Abd-el-Kader  and  Bona- 
parte are  worthy  of  a  place  among  the  earlier 
Oricntalcs  for  simplicity  and  fullness  of  effect  in 
lyric  tone  and  color;  and  satire  could  hardly  give 
a  finer  and  completer  little  study  than  that  of  the 
worthy  tradesman  who  for  love  of  his  own  strong- 
box would  give  his  vote  for  a  very  Phalaris  to 
reign  over  him,  and  put  up  with  the  brazen  bull 
for   love  of  the  golden  calf:  an  epigram   which 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  65 

sums  up  an  epoch.  The  indignant  poem  of  Joy- 
euse  Vie,  .with  its  terrible  photographs  of  subter- 
ranean toil  and  want,  is  answered  by  the  not  less 
terrible  though  ringing  and  radiant  song  of 
L enipereur  s'amuse;  and  this  again  by  the  four 
solemn  stanzas  in  which  a  whole  world  of  deso- 
late suffering  is  condensed  and  realized.  The 
verses  of  good  counsel  in  which  the  imperial  Ma- 
caire  is  admonished  not  to  take  himself  too  seri- 
ously, or  trust  in  the  duration  of  his  fair  and  foul 
good  fortune,  are  unsurpassed  for  concentration 
of  contempt.  The  dialogue  of  the  tyrannicide  by 
the  starlit  sea  with  all  visible  and  invisible  things 
that  impel  or  implore  him  to  do  justice  is  so 
splendid  and  thrilling  in  its  keen  and  ardent 
brevity  that  we  can  hardly  feel  as  though  a  suffi- 
cient answer  were  given  to  the  instinctive  reason- 
ing which  finds  inarticulate  utterance  in  the  cry 
of  the  human  conscience  for  retribution  by  a  hu- 
man hand,  even  when  we  read  the  two  poems,  at 
once  composed  and  passionate  in  their  austerity, 
which  bid  men  leave  God  to  deal  with  the  su- 
preme criminal  of  humanity.  A  Night's  Lodging, 
the  last  poem  of  the  fourth  book,  is  perhaps  the 
very  finest  and  most  perfect  example  of  imagina- 
tive and  tragic  satire  that  exists:  if  this  rank  be 


66  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

due  to  a  poem  at  once  the  most  vivid  in  presenta- 
tion, the  most  subHme  in  scorn,  the  most  intense 
and  absolute  in  condensed  expression  of  abhor- 
rence and  in  assured  expression  of  beHef. 

But  in  the  fifth  of  these  seven  caskets  of  chis- 
eled g'old  and  tempered  steel  there  is  a  pearl  of 
greater  price  than  in  any  of  the  four  yet  opened. 
The  song  dated  from  sea,  which  takes  farewell 
of  all  good  things  and  all  gladness  left  behind — 
of  house  and  home,  of  the  flowers  and  the  sky,  of 
the  betrothed  bride  with  her  maiden  brow — the 
song  which  has  in  its  burden  the  heavy  plashing 
sound  of  the  wave  following  on  the  wave  that 
swells  and  breaks  against  the  bulwarks — the  song 
of  darkening  waters  and  darkened  lives  has  in  it 
a  magic,  for  my  own  ear  at  least,  incomparable 
in  the  whole  wide  world  of  human  song.  Even 
to  the  greatest  poets  of  all  time  such  a  godsend 
as  this — such  a  breath  of  instant  inspiration — can 
come  but  rarely  and  seem  given  as  by  miracle. 
"  There  is  sorrow  on  the  sea,"  as  the  prophet 
said  of  old;  but  when  was  there  sorrow  on  sea 
or  land  which  found  such  piercing  and  such  per- 
fect utterance  as  this  ? 

Adieu,  patrie  ! 
L'onde  est  en  furie. 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  67 

Adieu,  patrie, 
Azur  ! 

Adieu,  maison,  treille  au  fruit  miir 
Adieu,  les  flours  d'or  du  vieux  mur! 

Adieu,  patrie ! 
Ciel,  foret,  prairie ! 
Adieu,  patrie, 
Azur  ! 

Adieu,  patrie  ! 
L'onde  est  en  furie. 
Adieu,  patrie, 
Azur  ! 

Adieu,  fiancee  au  front  pur, 
Le  ciel  est  noir,  le  vent  est  dur. 

Adieu,  patrie  ! 
Lise,  Anna,  Marie  ! 
Adieu,  patrie, 
Azur  ! 

Adieu,  patrie  ! 
L'onde  est  en  furie. 
Adieu,  patrie, 
Azur  ! 

Noire  oeil,  que  vjDile  un  dcuil  futur, 
Va  du  flut  sombre  au  sort  obscur. 

Adieu,  patrie  ! 
Pour  toi  mon  coeur  prie. 
Adieu,  patrie, 
Azur  ! 


68  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

The  next  poem  is  addressed  to  a  disappointed 
accomplice  of  the  crime  still  triumphant  and  im- 
perial in  the  eyes  of  his  fellow-scoundrels,  who 
seems  to  have  shown  signs  of  a  desire  to  break 
away  from  them  and  a  suspicion  that  even  then 
the  ship  of  empire  was  beginning  to  leak — though 
in  fact  it  had  still  seventeen  years  of  more  or  less 
radiant  rascality  to  float  through  before  it  found- 
ered in  the  ineffable  ignominy  of  Sedan.  Full  of 
ringing  and  stinging  eloquence,  of  keen  and  son- 
orous lines  or  lashes  of  accumulating  scorn,  this 
poem  is  especially  noteworthy  for  its  tribute  to 
the  m.urdered  republic  of  Rome.  Certain  pas- 
sages in  certain  earlier  works  of  Hugo,  in  Crovi- 
zvcll  for  instance  and  in  Marie  Tudor,  had  given 
rise  to  a  natural  and  indeed  inevitable  suspicion 
of  some  prejudice  or  even  antipathy  on  the  writ- 
er's part  which  had  not  less  unavoidably  aroused 
a  feeling  among  Italians  that  his  disposition  or 
tone  of  mind  was  anything  but  cordial  or  indeed 
amicable  towards  their  country:  a  suspicion  prob- 
ably heightened,  and  a  feeling  probably  sharp- 
ened, by  his  choice  of  such  dramatic  subjects 
from  Italian  history  or  tradition  as  the  domestic 
eccentricities  of  the  exceptional  family  of  Borgia, 
and  the  inquisitorial  misdirection  of  the   degen- 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  69 

erate  commonwealth  of  Venice.  To  the  sense 
that  Hugo  was  hardly  less  than  an  enemy  and 
that  Byron  had  been  something  more  than  a 
well-wisher  to  Italy  I  have  always  attributed 
the  unquestionable  and  otherwise  inexplicable 
fact  that  Mazzini  should  have  preferred  the 
pinchbeck  and  tinsel  of  Byron  to  the  gold  and 
ivory  of  Hugo.  But  it  was  impossible  that  the 
master  poet  of  the  world  should  not  live  to  make 
amends,  if  indeed  amends  were  needed,  to  the 
country  of  Mazzini  and  of  Dante. 

If  I  have  hardly  time  to  mention  the  simple 
and  vivid  narrative  of  the  martyrdom  of  Pauline 
Roland,  I  must  pause  at  least  to  dwell  for  a  mo- 
ment on  so  famous  and  so  great  a  poem  as 
L Expiation;  but  not  to  pronounce,  or  presume 
to  endeavor  to  decide,  which  of  its  several  pic- 
tures is  the  most  powerful,  which  of  its  epic  or 
lyric  variations  the  most  impressive  and  tri- 
umphant in  effect.  The  huge  historic  pageant 
of  ruin,  from  Moscow  to  Waterloo,  from  Water- 
loo to  St.  Helena,  with  the  posthumous  interlude 
of  apotheosis  which  the  poet  had  loudly  and 
proudly  celebrated  just  twelve  years  earlier  in 
an  ode,  turned  suddenly  into  the  peep-show  of 
a  murderous  mountebank,  the  tawdry  triumph  of 


70  A  •  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

buffoons  besmeared  with  innocent  blood,  is  so 
tremendous  in  its  anticlimax  that  not  the  sub- 
limest  and  most  miraculous  climax  imaginable 
could  make  so  tragic  and  sublime  an  impression 
so  indelible  from  the  mind.  The  slow  agony  of 
the  great  army  under  the  snow;  its  rout  and  dis- 
solution in  the  supreme  hour  of  panic;  the  slower 
agony,  the  more  gradual  dissolution,  of  the  pris- 
oner with  a  gaoler's  eye  intent  on  him  to  the 
last;  who  can  say  which  of  these  three  is  done 
into  verse  with  most  faultless  and  sovereign 
power  of  hand,  most  pathetic  or  terrific  force 
and  skill  ?  And  the  hideous  judicial  dishonor  of 
the  crowning  retribution  after  death,  the  parody 
of  his  empire  and  the  prostitution  of  his  name,  is 
so  much  more  than  tragic  by  reason  of  the  very 
farce  in  it  that  out  of  ignominy  itself  and  utter- 
most degradation  the  poet  has  made  something 
more  august  in  moral  impression  than  all  page- 
ants of  battle  or  of  death. 

In  the  sixth  book  I  can  but  rapidly  remark  the 
peculiar  beauty  and  greatness  of  the  lyric  lines 
in  which  the  sound  of  steady  seas  regularly  break- 
ing on  the  rocks  at  Rozel  Tower  is  rendered  with 
so  solemn  and  severe  an  echo  of  majestic  strength 
in  sadness;  the  verses  addressed  to  the  people  on 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  71 

its  likeness  and  unlikcness  to  the  sea;  the  scorn- 
ful and  fiery  appeal  to  the  spirit  of  Juvenal;  the 
perfect  idyllic  picture  of  spring,  with  all  the  fruit- 
less exultation  of  its  blossoms  and  its  birds,  made 
suddenly  dark  and  dissonant  by  recollection  of 
human  crime  and  shame;  the  heavenly  hopeful- 
ness of  comfort  in  the  message  of  the  morning 
star,  conveyed  into  colors  of  speech  and  trans- 
lated into  cadences  of  sound  which  no  painter  or 
musician  could  achieve. 

Je  m'etais  endormi  la  nuit  pres  de  la  greve. 
Un  vent  frais  m'eveilla,  je  sortis  de  men  reve, 
J'ouvris  les  yeux,  je  vis  Tetoile  du  matin. 
EUe  resplendissait  au  fond  du  ciel  lointain 
Dans  une  blancheur  moUe,  infinie  et  charmante. 
Aquilon  s'enfuyait  emportant  la  tourmente. 
L'astre  eclatant  changeait  la  nuee  en  duvet. 
C'etait  une  clarte  qui  pensait,  qui  vivait; 
Elle  apaisait  I'ecueil  ou  la  vague  deferle; 
On  croyait  voir  une  ame  a  travers  une  perle. 
II  faisait  nuit  encor,  Tombre  regnait  en  vain, 
Le  ciel  s'illuminait  d'un  sourire  divin. 
La  lueur  argentait  le  haut  du  mat  qui  penche; 
Le  navire  etait  noir,  mais  la  voile  etait  blanche; 
Des  goelands  debout  sur  un  e?carpement, 
Attentifs,  contemplaient  Tetoile  gravement 
Comme  un  oiseau  celeste  et  fait  dune  etincelle: 
L'ocean  qui  ressemble  au  peuple  allait  vers  elle, 
Et,  rugissant  tout  bas,  la  regardait  briller, 


72  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

Et  semblait  avoir  peur  de  la  faire  envoler. 

Un  ineffable  amour  emplissait  I'etendue. 

L'herbe  verte  a  mes  pieds  frissonnait  eperdue, 

Les  oiseaux  se  parlaient  dans  les  nids;  une  fleur 

Qui  s'eveillait  me  dit:  c'est  I'etoile  ma  soeur. 

Et  pendant  qu'a  longs  plis  I'ombre  levait  son  voile, 

J'entendis  une  voix  qui  venait  de  I'etoile 

Et  qui  disait: — Je  suis  I'astre  qui  vient  d'abord. 

Je  suis  celle  qu'on  croit  dans  la  tombe  et  qui  sort 

J'ai  lui  sur  le  Sina,  j'ai  lui  sur  le  Taygete; 

Je  suis  le  caillou  d'or  et  de  feu  que  Dieu  jette, 

Comme  avec  une  fronde,  au  front  noir  de  la  nuit. 

Je  suis  ce  qui  rcnait  quand  un  monde  est  detruit, 

O  nations  !  je  suis  la  Poesie  ardente. 

J'ai  brille  sur  Moise  et  j'ai  brille  sur  Dante. 

Le  lion  ocean  est  amoureux  de  moi. 

J'arrive.     Levez-vous,  vertu,  courage,  foi ! 

Penseurs,  esprits  !  montez  sur  la  tour,  sentinelles  ! 

Paupieres,  ouvrez-vous;  allumez-vous,  prunelles; 

Terre,  emeus  le  sillon;  vie,  eveille  le  bruit; 

Debout,  vous  qui  dormez;  car  celui  qui  me  suit, 

Car  celui  qui  m'envoie  en  avant  la  premiere, 

C'est  I'ange  Liberte,  c'est  le  geant  Lumiere  ! 

The  first  poem  of  the  seventh  book,  on  the  fall- 
ing of  the  walls  of  Jericho  before  the  seventh 
trumpet-blast,  is  equally  great  in  description  and 
in  application;  the  third  is  one  of  the  great  lyric 
masterpieces  of  all  time,  the  triumphant  ballad 
of  the  Black  Huntsman,  unsurpassed  in  the  world 
for  ardor  of  music  and  fitful  change  of  note  from 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  73 

mystery  and  terror  to  rage  and  tempest  and  su- 
preme serenity  of  exultation — "  wind  and  storm 
fulfilling  his  word,"  we  may  literally  say  of  this 
omnipotent  sovereign  of  song. 

The  sewer  of  Rome,  a  final  receptacle  for  dead 
dogs  and  rotting  Caesars,  is  painted  line  by  line 
and  detail  by  detail  in  verse  which  touches  with 
almost  frightful  skill  the  very  limit  of  the  possible 
or  permissible  to  poetry  in  the  way  of  realistic 
loathsomeness  or  photographic  horror;  relieved 
here  and  there  by  a  rare  and  exquisite  image,  a 
fresh  breath  or  tender  touch  of  loveliness  from 
the  open  air  of  the  daylight  world  above.  The 
song  on  the  two  Napoleons  is  a  masterpiece  of 
skilful  simplicity  in  contrast  of  tones  and  colors. 
But  the  song  which  follows,  written  to  a  tune  of 
Beethoven's,  has  in  it  something  more  than  the 
whole  soul  of  music,  the  whole  passion  of  self- 
devoted  hope  and  self-transfiguring  faith;  it  gives 
the  final  word  of  union  between  sound  and  spirit, 
the  mutual  coronation  and  consummation  of  them 

both. 

PA  TRIA. 

La-haut  qui  sourit? 

Esl-ce  un  esprit? 

Est-ce  une  femme  } 
Quel  front  sombre  et  doux  ! 


74  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

Peuple,  a  genoux  ! 
Est-ce  notre  ame 
Qui  vient  a  nous  ? 

Cette  figure  en  deuil 
Parait  sur  notre  seuil, 
Et  notre  antique  orgueil 

Sort  du  cercucil. 
Ses  fiers  regards  \ainqueurs 
Reveillent  tous  Ics  coeurs, 
Les  nids  dans  les  buissons, 

Et  les  chansons, 

C'est  I'ange  du  jour; 

L'espoir,  I'amour 

Du  coeur  qui  pense; 
Du  monde  enchante 

C'est  la  clarte. 

Son  nom  est  France 

Ou  Verite. 

Bel  ange,  a  ton  miroir 
Quand  s'oifre  un  vil  jiouvoir, 
Tu  viens,  terrible  a  voir, 

Sous  le  ciel  noir. 
Tu  dis  au  monde:  Allons  ! 
Eormcz  vos  bataillons  ! 
Et  le  monde  ebloui 

Te  repond:  Oui. 

C'est  I'ange  de  nuit. 
RoiSj  il  vous  suit, 
Marquant  d'avance 

Le  fatal  moment 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  75 

Au  firmament 
Son  nom  est  France 
Ou  Chatiment. 

Ainsi  que  nous  voyons 
En  mai  les  alcyons, 
Voguez,  6  nations, 

Dans  ses  rayons  ' 
Son  bras  aux  cieux  dress6 
Ferme  le  noir  passe 
Et  les  portes  de  fer 

Du  sombre  enfer. 

C'est  I'ange  de  Dieu. 

Dans  le  ciel  bleu 

Son  aile  immense 
Couvre  avec  fierte 

L'humanile. 

Son  nom  est  France 

Ou  Liberie  ! 

The  Caravan,  a  magnificent  picture,  is  also  a 
magnificent  allegory  and  a  magnificent  hymn. 
The  poem  following  sums  up  in  twenty-six  lines 
a  whole  world  of  terror  and  of  tempest  hurtling 
and  wailing  round  the  wreck  of  a  boat  by  night. 
It  is  followed  by  a  superb  appeal  against  the  in- 
fliction of  death  on  rascals  whose  reptile  blood 
would  dishonor  and  defile  the  scaffold:  and  this 
again  by  an  admonition  to  their  chief  not  to  put 
his  trust  in  the  chance  of  a  high   place  of  infamy 


76  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

among  the  more  genuinely  imperial  hellhounds  of 
historic  record.  The  next  poem  gives  us  in  per- 
fect and  exquisite  summary  the  opinions  of  a 
contemporary  conservative  on  a  dangerous  an- 
archist of  extravagant  opinions  and  disreputable 
character,  whom  for  example's  sake  it  was  at 
length  found  necessary  to  crucify.  There  is  no 
song  more  simply  and  nobly  pitiful  than  that 
which  tells  us  in  its  burden  how  a  man  may  die 
for  lack  of  his  native  country  as  naturally  and 
inevitably  as  for  lack  of  his  daily  bread.  I  cite 
only  the  last  three  stanzas  by  way  of  sample. 

Les  exiles:  s'en  vont  pensifs. 
Leur  ame,  helas  !  n'est  plus  entiere. 
lis  regardant  rombre  des  ifs 
Sur  les  fosses  du  cimetiere; 
L'un  songe  a  rAllemagne  altiere, 
L'autre  an  beau  pays  iransalpin, 
L'autre  a  sa  Pologne  cherie. 
— On  ne  peut  pas  vivre  sans  pain; 
On  ne  peut  pas  non  plus  vivre  sans  la  patrie. — 

Un  proscrit,  lasse  de  souffrir, 
Mourait;  calme,  il  fermait  son  livre; 
Et  je  lui  dis:   "  Pourquoi  mourir  ?" 
II  me  repondit:  "  Pourquoi  vivre  ?" 
Puis  il  reprit:  "  Je  me  delivre. 
Adieu  !  je  meurs.     Neron  Scapin 
Met  aux  fers  la  France  fletrie.  .  .  ." 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  77 

— On  ne  peut  pas  vivre  sans  pain; 
Ou  ne  peut  pas  non  plus  vivre  sans  la  patrie. 

".  .  .  Je  meurs  de  ne  plus  voir  les  champs 
Ou  je  regardais  I'aube  naitrc, 
De  ne  plus  entendre  les  chants 
Que  j'entendais  de  ma  fenetre. 
IMon  ame  est  ou  je  ne  puis  etre. 
Sons  quatre  planches  de  sapin 
Enterrez-moi  dans  la  prairie." 
— On  ne  peut  pas  vivre  sans  pain; 
On  ne  peut  pas  non  plus  vivre  sans  la  patrie. 

Then,  in  the  later  editions  of  the  book,  came  the 
great  and  terrible  poem  on  the  life  and  death  of 
the  miscreant  marshal  who  gave  the  watchword 
of  massacre  in  the  streets  of  Paris,  and  died  by 
the  visitation  of  disease  before  the  walls  of  Sebas- 
topol.  There  is  hardly  a  more  splendid  passage 
of  its  kind  in  all  the  Lc'gcndc  dcs  Sicclcs  than  the 
description  of  the  departure  of  the  fleet  in  order 
of  battle  from  Constantinople  for  the  Crimea;  nor 
a  loftier  passage  of  more  pathetic  austerity  in  all 
this  book  of  Chdtunciits  than  the  final  address  of 
the  poet  to  the  miserable  soul,  disembodied  at 
length  after  long  and  loathsome  suffering,  of  the 
murderer  and  traitor  who  had  earned  no  soldier's 
death.' 

'  This  poem  on  St-Arnaud  is  dated  from  Jersey,  and  must  there- 
fore have  been  written  before  the  second   of  November,  1855 — a 


78  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

And  then  come  those  majestic  "last  words" 
which  will  ring  for  ever  in  the  ears  of  men  till 
manhood  as  well  as  poetry  has  ceased  to  have 
honor  among  mankind.  And  then  comes  a  poem 
so  great  that  I  hardly  dare  venture  to  attempt  a 
word  in  its  praise.  We  cannot  choose  but  think, 
as  we  read  or  repeat  it,  that  "such  music  was 
never  made "  since  the  morning  stars  sang  to- 
gether, and  all  the  sons  of  God  shouted  for  joy. 
This  epilogue  of  a  book  so  bitterly  and  inflexibly 
tragic  begins  as  with  a  peal  of  golden  bells,  or  an 
outbreak  of  all  April  in  one  choir  of  sunbright 
song;  proceeds  in  a  graver  note  of  deep  and 
trustful  exultation  and  yearning  towards  the  fu- 
ture; subsides  again  into  something  of  a  more 
subdued  key,  while  the  poet  pleads  for  his  faith 
in  a  God  of  righteousness  with  the  righteous  who 
are  ready  to  despair;  and  rises  from  that  tone  of 
awe-stricken  and  earnest  pleading  to  such  a 
height  and  rapture  of  inspiration  as  no  Hebrew 
psalmist  or  prophet  ever  soared  beyond  in  his 
divinest  passion  of  aspiring  trust  and  worship. 
It    is    simply   impossible    that    a    human    tongue 

date  of  disgrace  for  Jersey,  if  not  indeed  for  England.  It  appears 
in  the  various  later  editions  of  the  Chatiinetits,  but  has  disappeared 
from  the  so-caUed  "edition  definitive."  All  readers  have  aright 
to  ask  why — and  a  right  to  be  answered  when  they  ask. 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  79 

should  utter,  a  human  hand  should  write,  any- 
thing of  more  supreme  and  transcendent  beauty 
than  the  last  ten  stanzas  of  the  fourth  division  of 
this  poem.  The  passionate  and  fervent  accumu- 
lation of  sublimities,  of  marvellous  images  and  of 
infinite  appeal,  leaves  the  sense  too  dazzled,  the 
soul  too  entranced  and  exalted,  to  appreciate  at 
first  or  in  full  the  miraculous  beauty  of  the  lan- 
guage, the  superhuman  sweetness  of  the  song. 
The  reader  impervious  to  such  impressions  may 
rest  assured  that  what  he  admires  in  the  proph- 
ecies or  the  psalms  of  Isaiah  or  of  David  is  not 
the  inspiration  of  the  text,  but  the  warrant  and 
sign-manual  of  the  councils  and  the  churches 
which  command  him  to  admire  them  on  trust. 

Ne  possede-t-il  pas  toute  la  certitude.^ 

Dieu  ne  remplit-il  pas  ce  monde,  notre  eiude,. 

Du  nadir  au  zenith  } 
Notre  sagesse  aupres  de  la  sienne  est  demence. 
Et  n'est-ce  pas  a  lui  que  la  clane  commence, 

Et  que  rombre  finit } 

Ne  voit-il  pas  ramp  r  les  hydres  sur  leurs  ventres.-' 
Ne  regarde-t-il  j-as  jusqu'au  fond  de  leurs  antres 

Alias  et  Pelion .? 
Ne  connait-il  pas  I'heure  ou  la  cigogne  emigre? 
Sait  il  pas  ton  entree  et  ta  sortie,  o  tigre, 

Et  ton  antre,  0  lion  ? 


)  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

Hirondelle,  reponds,  aigle  a  I'aile  sonore, 
Parle,  avez-vous  des  nids  que  TEiernel  ignore? 

O  cerf,  quand  I'as-tu  fui  ? 
Renard,  ne  vois-tu  pas  ses  yeux  dans  la  broussaille  ? 
Loup,  quand  tu  sens  la  nuit  une  herbe  qui  tressaille, 

Ne  dis-tu  pas:  C'est  lui  ! 

• 

Puisqu'il  salt  tout  cela,  puisqu'il  pout  toute  chose. 
Que  ses  doigts  font  jaillir  les  effets  de  la  cause 

Comme  un  noyau  d'un  fruit, 
Puisqu'il  pent  meltre  unver  dans  les  pommes  de  I'arbre, 
Et  faire  disperser  les  colonnes  de  marbre 

Par  le  vent  de  la  nuit; 

Puisqu'il  bat  I'ocean  pareil  au  bceuf  qui  beugle, 
Puisqu'il  est  le  voyant  et  que  rhomme  est  I'aveugle, 

Puisqu'il  est  le  milieu, 
Puisque  son  bras  nous  porte,  et  puisqu'a  son  passage 
La  comete  frissonne  ainsi  qu'en  une  cage 

Tremble  une  etoupe  en  feu; 

Puisque  I'obscure  nuit  le  connait,  puisque  I'ombre 
Le  voit,  quand  il  lui  plait,  sauver  la  nef  qui  sombre, 

Comment  douterions-nous, 
Nouis  qui,  formes  et  purs,  fiers  dans  nos  agonies, 
Sommes  debout  devant  toutes  les  tyrannies, 

Pour  lui  seul,  a  genoux  ! 

D'ailleurs,  pensons.     Nos  jours  sont  des  jours  d'amer- 

tume, 
Mais,  quand  nous  etendons  les  bras  dans  cette  brume, 

Nous  sentons  une  main; 
Quand  nous  marchons,  courbes,  dans  Tombre  du  martyre, 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  8i 

Nous  entendons  quelqu'un  derriere  nous  nous  dire: 
C'est  ici  le  chemin. 

O  proscrits,  I'avenir  est  aux  peuples  !     Paix,  gloire, 
Liberie,  reviendront  sur  des  chars  de  victoire 

Aux  R)udroyants  essieux; 
Ce  crime  qui  triomphe  est  fumee  et  mensonge. 
Voila  ce  que  je  puis  aflirmer,  moi  qui  songe 

L'oeil  fixe  sur  les  cieux. 

Les  cesars  sont  plus  fiers  que  les  vagues  marines, 
Mais  Dieu  dit: — Je  mettrai  ma  boucle  en  leurs  narines, 

Et  dans  leur  bouche  un  mors, 
Et  je  tes  trainerai,  qu'on  cede  ou  bien  qu'on  lutte, 
Eux  et  leurs  liistrit)ns  et  leurs  joueurs  de  flute, 

Dans  I'ombre  ou  sont  les  morts  ! 

Dieu  dit;  et  le  granit  que  foulait  leur  semelle 
S'ecroule,  et  les  voila  disparus  pele-mele 

Dans  leurs  prosperites  ! 
Aquilon  !  aquilon  !  qui  viens  battre  nos  portes. 
Oh  !  dis-nous,  si  c'est  toi,  souffle,  qui  les  emportes, 

Oil  les  as-tu  jetes  ? 

Three  years  after  the  CJidtinicnts  Victor  Hugo 
published  the  Contemplations;  the  book  of  whicli 
he  said  that  if  the  title  did  not  sound  somewhat 
pretentious  it  might  be  called  "the  memoirs  of  a 
soul."  No  book  had  ever  in  it  more  infinite  and 
exquisite  variety;  no  concert  ever  diversified  and 
united  such  inexhaustible  melodies  with  such  un- 
surpassable  harmonies.     The  note  of  fatherhood 


82  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

was  never  touched  more  tenderly  than  in  the 
opening  verses  of  gentle  counsel,  whose  cadence 
is  fresher  and  softer  than  the  lapse  of  rippling 
water  or  the  sense  of  falling  dew:  the  picture  of 
the  poet's  two  little  daughters  in  the  twilight 
garden  might  defy  all  painters  to  translate  it: 
the  spirit,  force,  and  fun  of  the  controversial 
poems,  overflowing  at  once  with  good  humor, 
with  serious  thought,  and  with  kindly  indigna- 
tion, give  life  and  charm  to  the  obsolete  ques- 
tions of  wrangling  schools  and  pedants;  and  the 
last  of  them,  on  the  divine  and  creative  power 
of  speech,  is  at  once  profound  and  sublime  enough 
to  grapple  easily  and  thoroughly  with  so  high 
and  deep  a  subject.  The  songs  of  childish  loves 
and  boyish  fancies  are  unequalled  by  any  other 
poets  known  to  me  for  their  union  of  purity  and 
gentleness  with  a  touch  of  dawning  ardor  and  a 
hint  of  shy  delight:  Lise,  La  Coccinelle,  Vieille 
chanson  du  jeune  temps,  are  such  sweet  miracles 
of  simple  perfection  as  we  hardly  find  except  in 
the  old  songs  of  unknown  great  poets  who  died 
and  left  no  name.  The  twenty-first  poem,  a  lyric 
idyl  of  but  sixteen  lines,  has  something  more 
than  the  highest  qualities  of  Theocritus;  in  color 
and  in  melody  it  does  but  equal  the  Sicilian  at 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  83 

his  best,  but  there  are  two  Hnes  at  least  in  it 
beyond  his  reach  for  depth  and  majesty  of  beauty. 
Childhood  and  Unity,  two  poems  of  twelve  and 
ten  lines  respectively,  are  a  pair  of  such  flawless 
jewels  as  lie  now  in  no  living  poet's  casket. 
Among  the  twenty-eight  poems  of  the  second 
book,  if  I  venture  to  name  with  special  regard 
the  second  and  the  fourth,  two  songs  uniting  the 
subtle  tenderness  of  Shelley's  with  the  frank  sim- 
plicity of  Shakespeare's;  the  large  and  living  land- 
scape in  a  letter  dated  from  Treport;  the  tenth 
and  the  thirteenth  poems,  two  of  the  most  per- 
fect love-songs  in  the  world,  written  (if  the  phrase 
be  permissible)  in  a  key  of  serene  rapture;  the 
*'  morning's  note,"  with  its  vision  of  the  sublime 
sweetness  of  life  transfigured  in  a  dream;  Twi- 
light, with  its  opening  touches  of  magical  and 
mystic  beauty;  above  all,  the  mournful  and  ten- 
der magnificence  of  the  closing  poem,  with  a 
pathetic  significance  in  the  double  date  appended 
to  the  text:  I  am  ready  to  confess  that  it  is  per- 
haps presumptuous  to  express  a  preference  even 
for  these  over  the  others.  Yet  perhaps  it  may 
be  permissible  to  select  for  transcription  two  of 
the  sweetest  and  shortest  amoner  them. 


84  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

Mes  vers  fuiraient,  doux  et  freles, 
Vers  votre  jardin  si  beau, 
Si  mes  vers  avaient  des  ailes, 
Des  ailes  comme  I'oiseau. 

lis  voleraient,  etincelles, 
Vers  votre  foyer  qui  rit, 
Si  mes  vers  avaient  des  ailes, 
Des  ailes  comme  I'esprit. 

Pres  de  vous,  purs  et  fideles, 
lis  accourraient  nuit  et  jour, 
Si  mes  vers  avaient  des  ailes, 
Des  ailes  comme  I'amour. 

Nothing  of  Shelley's  exceeds  this  for  limpid  per- 

fection.of  melody,  renewed  in  the  next  lyric  with 

something  of  a  deeper  and   more  fervent  note  of 

music. 

Si  vous  n'avez  rien  a  me  dire, 
Pourquoi  venir  aupres  de  moi  ? 
Pourquoi  me  faire  ce  sourire 
Qui  tournerait  la  tete  au  roi  ? 
Si  vous  n'avez  rien  a  me  dire, 
Pourquoi  venir  aupres  de  moi? 

Si  vous  n'avez  rien  a  m'apprendre, 
Pourquoi  me  pressez-vous  la  main  ? 
Sur  le  reve  angelique  et  tendre, 
Auquel  vous  songez  en  chemin, 
Si  vous  n'avez  rien  a  m'apprendre, 
Pourquoi  me  pressez-vous  la  main  ? 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  85 

Si  vous  voulez  que  je  m'en  aille, 
Pourquoi  passez-vous  par  ici? 
Lorsque  je  vous  vcjis,  je  tressaille, 
C'est  ma  joie  et  c'est  mon  souci. 
Si  vous  voulez  que  je  m'en  aille, 
Pourquoi  passez-vous  par  ici  ? 

In  the  third  book,  which  brings  us  up  to  the 
great  poet's  forty-second  year,  the  noble  poem 
called  MelancJiolia  has  in  it  a  foretaste  and  a 
promise  of  all  the  passionate  meditation,  all  the 
studious  and  indefatigable  pity,  all  the  forces  of 
wisdom  and  of  mercy  which  were  to  find  their 
completer  and  supreme  expression  in  Les  Mise'ra- 
bles.  In  Saturn  we  may  trace  the  same  note  of 
earnest  and  thoughtful  meditation  on  the  mystery 
of  evil,  on  the  vision  so  long  cherished  by  man- 
kind of  some  purgatorial  world,  the  shrine  of  ex- 
piation or  the  seat  of  retribution,  which  in  the 
final  volume  of  the  Le'gende  dcs  Siecles  was 
toched  again  with  a  yet  more  august  effect:  the 
poem  there  called  Inferi  resumes  and  expands 
the  tragic  thought  here  first  admitted  into  speech 
and  first  clothed  round  with  music.  The  four 
lines  written  beneath  a  crucifix  may  almost  be 
said  to  sum  up  the  whole  soul  and  spirit  of  Chris- 
tian faith  or  feeling  in  the   brief  hour  of  its  early 


86  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

purity,  revived  in  every  age  again  for  some  rare 
and  beautiful  natures — and  for  these  alone. 

Vous  qui  pleurez,  venez  a  ce  Dieu,  car  il  pleure. 
Vous  qui  souffrez,  venez  a  lui,  car  il  guerit. 
Vous  qui  tremblez,  venez  a  lui,  car  il  sourit. 
Vous  qui  passez,  venez  a  lui,  car  il  demeure. 

La  StaUte,  with  its  grim  swift  glance  over  the 
worldwide  rottenness  of  imperial  Rome,  finds 
again  an  echo  yet  fuller  and  more  sonorous  than 
the  note  which  it  repeats  in  the  poem  on  Ro- 
man decadence  which  forms  the  eighth  division 
of  the  revised  and  completed  Lcgende  des  Siccles. 
The  two  delicately  tender  poems  on  the  death  of 
a  little  child  are  well  relieved  by  the  more  terri- 
ble tenderness  of  the  poem  on  a  mother  found 
dead  of  want  among  her  four  little  children.  In 
this  and  the  next  poem,  a  vivid  and  ghastly  pho- 
tograph of  vicious  poverty,  we  find  again  the  same 
spirit  of  observant  and  vigilant  compassion  that 
inspires  and  informs  the  great  prose  epic  of  suf- 
fering which  records  the  redemption  of  Jean  Val- 
jean:  and  in  the  next,  suggested  by  the  sight  (a 
sorrowful  sight  always,  except  perhaps  to  very 
small  children  or  adults  yet  more  diminutive  in 
mental  or  spiritual  size)  of  a  caged  lion,  we  re- 
cognize the  depth  of  noble  pity  which  moved  its 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  ^7 

author  to  write  Le  Crapaud — a  poem  redeemed 
in  all  rational  men's  eyes  from  the  imminent  im- 
putation of  repulsive  realism  by  the  profound  and 
pathetic  beauty  of  the  closing  lines — and  we  may 
recognize  also  the  imaginative  and  childlike  sym- 
pathy with  the  traditional  king  of  beasts  which 
inspired  him  long  after  to  write  L Epopee  dii  Lion 
for  the  benefit  of  his  grandchildren.  Insomnic,  a 
record  of  the  tribute  exacted  by  the  spirit  from 
the  body,  when  the  impulse  to  work  and  to  cre- 
ate will  not  let  the  weary  workman  take  his  rest, 
but  enforces  him,  reluctant  and  recalcitrant,  to 
rise  and  gird  up  his  loins  for  labor  in  the  field  of 
imaginative  thought,  is  itself  a  piece  of  work  well 
worth  the  sacrifice  even  of  the  happiness  of  sleep. 
The  verses  on  music,  suggested  by  the  figure  of  a 
flute-playing  shepherd  on  a  bas-relief;  the  splendid 
and  finished  picture  of  spring,  softened  rather 
than  shadowed  by  the  quiet  thought  of  death;  the 
deep  and  tender  fancy  of  the  dead  child's  return 
to  its  mother  through  the  gateway  of  a  second 
birth;  the  grave  sweetness  and  gentle  fervor  of 
the  verses  on  the  outcast  and  detested  things  of 
the  animal  and  the  vegetable  world;  and,  last, 
the  nobly  thoughtful  and  eloquent  poem  on  the 
greatness  of  such  little  things  as  the  fire  on  the 


88  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

shepherd's  hearth  confronting  the  star  at  sunset, 
which  may  be  compared  with  the  Prayer  for  all 
men  in  the  Fciullcs  iV Aiitoinnc;  these  at  least  de- 
mand a  rapid  word  of  thankful  recognition  before 
we  close  the  first  volume  of  the  Contemplations. 

The  fourth  book,  as  most  readers  will  probably 
remember,  contains  the  poems  written  in  memory 
of  Victor  Hugo's  daughter,  drowned  by  the  acci- 
dental capsizing  of  a  pleasure-boat,  just  six  months 
and  seventeen  days  after  her  marriage  with  the 
young  husband  who  chose  rather  to  share  her 
death  than  to  save  himself  alone.  These  immor- 
tal songs  of  mourning  are  almost  too  sacred  for 
critical  appreciation  of  even  the  most  reverent 
and  subdued  order.  There  are  numberless  touches 
in  them  of  such  thrilling  beauty,  so  poignant  in 
their  simplicity  and  so  piercing  in  their  truth,  that 
silence  is  perhaps  the  best  or  the  only  commenta- 
ry on  anything  so  "  rarely  sweet  and  bitter."  One 
only  may  perhaps  be  cited  apart  from  its  fellows: 
the  sublime  little  poem  headed  Mors. 

Je  vis  cette  faucheuse.     Elle  etait  dans  son  champ. 
Elle  allait  a  grands  pas  moissonnant  et  fauchant, 
Noir  squelette  laissant  passer  le  crepuscule. 
Dans  Tombre  on  Ton  dirait  que  tout  tremble  et  recule, 
L'homme  suivait  des  yeux  les  lueurs  de  sa  faulx. 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  89 

Et  les  iriomphateurs  sous  les  arcs  triomphaux 
Tombaient;  elle  changeait  en  desert  Babylone, 
Le  trone  en  echafaud  et  1  echafaud  en  trone, 
Les  roses  en  fumier,  les  enfants  en  oiseaux, 
L'or  en  cendre,  et  les  yeux  des  meres  en  ruisseaux. 
Et  les  femmes  criaient:    Rends-nous  ce  petit  etre. 
Pour  le  faire  mourir,  pourquoi  Tavoir  fait  naitre  ? 
Ce  n  etait  qu'un  sanglot  sur  terre,  en  haut,  en  has; 
Des  mains  aux  doigts  osseux  sortaint  des  noirs  grabats; 
Un  vent  froid  bruisbait  dans  les  linceuls  sans  nombre; 
Les  peuples  eperdus  semblaient  sous  la  faulx  sombre 
Un  troupeau  frissonnant  qui  dans  I'ombre  s'enfuit: 
Tout  etait  sous  ses  pieds  deuil,  epouvante  et  nuit. 
Derriere  elle,  le  front  baigne  de  douces  flammes, 
Un  ange  souriant  portait  la  gerbe  d  ames. 

The  fifth  book  opens  most  fitly  with  an  address 
to  the  noble  poet  who  was  the  comrade  of  the 
author's  exile  and  the  brother  of  his  self-devoted 
son-in-law.  Even  Hugo  never  wrote  anything 
of  more  stately  and  superb  simplicity  than  this 
tribute  of  fatherly  love  and  praise,  so  well  deserved 
and  so  royally  bestowed.  The  second  poem,  ad- 
dressed to  the  son  of  a  poet  who  had  the  honor 
to  receive  the  greatest  of  all  his  kind  as  a  passing 
guest  in  the  first  days  of  his  long  exile,  is  as  sim- 
ple and  noble  as  it  is  gentle  and  austere.  The 
third,  written  in  reply  to  the  expostulations  of  an 
old  friend  and  a  distant  kinsman,  is  that  admira- 


90  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

ble  vindication  of  a  man's  right  to  grow  wiser, 
and  of  his  duty  to  speak  the  truth  as  he  comes  to 
see  it  better,  which  must  have  imposed  silence 
and  impressed  respect  on  all  assailants  if  respect 
for  integrity  and  genius  were  possible  to  the  imbe- 
cile or  the  vile,  and  if  silence  or  abstinence  from 
insult  were  possible  to  the  malignant  or  the  fool 
The  epilogue,  appended  nine  years  later  to  this 
high-minded  and  brilliant  poem,  is  as  noble  in  im- 
agination, in  feeling,  and  in  expression,  as  the 
finest  page  in  the  CJidtimcnts. 

£CRIT  EN  iSsS- 

J'ajoute  un  post-scriptum  apres  neuf  ans.     J'ecoute; 
Etes-vous  toujours  la?     Vous  etes  mort  sans  doute, 
Marquis;  mais  d'ou  je  suis  on  peut  parler  aux  morts. 
Ah  !  votre  cercueil  s'ouvre: — Ou  done  es  tu  ? — Dehors. 
Comme  vous. — Es-lu  mort? — Presque.  J'habite  rombre. 
Je  suis  sur  un  rocher  qu'environne  I'eau  sombre, 
Ecueil  rongc  des  flots,  de  tenebres  charge, 
Oii  s'assied,  ruisselant,  le  bleme  naufrage. 
— Eh  bien,  me  dites-vous,  apres  ?— La  solitude 
Autour  de  moi  toujours  a  la  meme  attitude; 
Je  ne  vois  que  I'abime,  et  la  mcr,  et  les  cieux, 
Et  les  nuagesnoirs  qui  vont  silencieux; 
Mon  toit,  la  nuit,  frissonne,  et  I'ouragan  le  mele 
Aux  souffles  effrenes  de  I'onde  et  de  la  grele; 
Quelqu'un  semble  clouer  un  crepe  a  I'horizon; 
L'insulte  dat  de  loin  le  seuil  de  ma  maison; 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  91 

Le  roc  croule  sous  moi  des  que  mon  pied  s'y  pose; 
Le  vent  semble  avoir  peur  de  m'approcher,  et  n'ose 
Me  dire  qu'en  baissant  la  voix  et  qu'a  demi 
L'adieu  mysterieux  que  me  jette  un  ami. 
La  rumeur  des  vivants  s'eteint  diminuee. 
Tout  ce  que  j'ai  reve  s'est  envole,  nuee  ! 
Sur  mes  jours  devenus  fant6me«,  pale  et  seul, 
Je  regarde  tomber  I'infini,  ce  linceul. — 
Et  vous  dites: — Apres  ? — Sous  un  montqui  surplombe, 
Pres  des  flots,  j'ai  marque  la  place  de  ma  tombe; 
Ici,  le  bruit  du  gouffre  est  tout  ce  qu'on  entend; 
Tout  est  horreur  et  nuit^Apres  ? — Je  suis  content. 

The  verses  addressed  to  friends  whose  love  and 
reverence  had  not  forsaken  the  exile — to  Jules 
Janin,  to  Alexandre  Dumas,  above  all  to  Paul 
Meurice — are  models  of  stately  grace  in  their  ut- 
terance of  serene  and  sublime  resignation,  of 
loyal  and  affectionate  sincerity:  but  those  ad- 
dressed to  the  sharers  of  his  exile — to  his  wife,  to 
his  children,  to  their  friend — have  yet  a  deeper 
spiritual  music  in  the  sweet  and  severe  perfection 
of  their  solemn  cadence.  I  have  but  time  to 
name  with  a  word  of  homage  in  passing  the  fa- 
mous and  faultless  little  poem  Aux  Fciiillantines, 
fragrant  with  the  memory  and  musical  as  the 
laugh  of  childhood;  the  memorial  verses  recurr- 
ing here  and  there,  with  such  infinite  and  subtle 
variations  on  the  same  deep  theme  of  mourning 


92  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

or  of  sympathy;  the  great  brief  studies  of  lonely 
landscape,  imbued  with  such  grave  radiance  and 
such  noble  melancholy,  or  kindled  with  the 
motion  and  quickened  by  the  music  of  the  sea: 
but  two  poems  at  all  events  I  must  select  for 
more  especial  tribute  of  more  thankful  recognition : 
the  sublime  and  'wonderful  vision  of  the  angel 
who  was  neither  life  nor  death,  but  love,  more 
strong  than  either;  and  the  all  but  sublimer  al- 
legory couched  in  verse  of  such  majestic  reson- 
ance, which  shows  us  the  star  of  Venus  in  heaven 
above  the  ruin  of  her  island  on  earth.  The  former 
and  shorter  of  these  is  as  excellent  an  example  as 
could  be  chosen  of  its  author's  sovereign  simplic- 
ity of  insight  and  of  style. 

APPARITION. 

Je  vis  un  ange  blanc  qui  passait  sur  ma  lete; 

Son  vol  eblouissant  apaisait  la  tempcte, 

Et  faisait  taire  au  loin  la  mer  pleine  de  bruit. 

— Qu'es:-ce  que  tu  viens  faire,  ange,  dans  cette  nuit.? 

Lui  dis-je.  II  repondit: — Je  viens  prendre  ton  ame. — 

Et  j'eus  peur,  car  je  vis  que  cetait  une  femme; 

Et  je  lui  dis,  tremblant  et  lui  tendant  les  bras: 

— Que  me  restera-t-il }  car.tu  t'envolcras. — 

II  ne  repondit  pas;  le  ciel  que  Tombre  assiege 

S'eteignait.   .  .   . — Si  tu  prends  men  ame,  m'ecriai-je, 

Ou  remporteras-tu  }  montre-moi  dans  quel  lieu. 

II  se  taisait  toujours.— O  passant  du  ciel  bleu, 


THE   WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  93 

Es-tu  la  mort?  lui  dis-je,  ou  bien  es-tu  la  vie? — 
Et  la  nuit  augmentait  sur  mon  ame  ravie, 
Et  I'ange  devint  noir,  et  dit: — Je  suis  ramour. 
Mais  son  front  sombre  ctait  plus  charmant  que  le  jour, 
Et  je  voyais,  dans  I'ombre  ou  brillaient  ses   prunelles, 
Les  astres  a  travers  les  plumes  de  ses  ailes. 
If  nothing  were  left  of  Hugo  but  the  sixth  book 
of  the  ContcDi^Jations,  it  would  yet  be  indisput- 
able among  those  who  know  anything  of  poetry 
that  he  was  among  the  foremost  in  the  front  rank 
of  the  greatest  poets  of  all  time.     Here,  did  space 
allow,  it  would  be  necessary  for  criticism  with  any 
pretence  to  adequacy  to   say  something  of  every 
poem  in   turn,  to  pause  for  observation  of  some 
beauty  beyond  reach  of  others  at  every  successive 
page.     In  the  first  poem  a  sublime  humility  finds 
such  expression  as  should  make  manifest  to  the 
dullest  eye  not  clouded  by  malevolence  and  in- 
solent conceit  that  when  this  greatest  of  modern 
poets  asserts  in  his   own   person   the   prerogative 
and  assumes  for  his  own  spirit  the  high  office  of 
humanity,  to  confront  the  darkest   problem   and 
to  challenge  the  utmost   force   of  intangible  and 
invisible  injustice  as   of  visible   and  tangible  in- 
iquity, of  all  imaginable  as  of  all   actual  evil,  of 
superhuman    indifference    as    well    as    of    human 
wrongdoing,  it  is  no  merely  personal  claim  that  he 


94  A  STUDV  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

puts  forward,  no  vainly  egotistic  arrogance  that 
he  displays;  but  the  right  of  a  reasonable  con- 
science and  the  duty  of  a  righteous  faith,  common 
to  ail  men  alike  in  whom  intelligence  of  right  and 
wrong,  perception  of  duty  or  conception  of  con- 
science can  be  said  to  exist  at  all.  If  there  beany 
truth  in  the  notion  of  any  difference  between  evil 
and  good  more  serious  than  the  conventional  and 
convenient  fabrications  of  doctrine  and  assump- 
tion, then  assuredly  the  meanest  of  his  creatures 
in  whom  the  perception  of  this  difference  was  not 
utterly  extinct  would  have  aright  to  denounce  an 
omnipotent  evil-doer  as  justly  amenable  to  the 
sentence  inflicted  by  the  thunders  of  his  own  un- 
righteous judgment.  How  profound  and  intense 
was  the  disbelief  of  Victor  Hugo  in  the  rule  or  in 
the  existence  of  any  such  superhuman  malefactor 
could  not  be  better  shown  than  by  the  almost  po- 
lemical passion  of  his  prophetic  testimony  to  that 
need  for  faith  in  a  central  conscience  and  a  cen- 
tral will  on  which  he  has  insisted  again  and 
again  as  a  crowning  and  indispensable  requisite 
for  moral  and  spiritual  life.  From  the  sublime 
daring,  the  self-confidence  born  of  self-devotion, 
which  finds  lyrical  utterance  in  the  majestic  verses 
headed    Ibo^  through    the  humble    and    haughty 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  95 

earnestness  of  remonstrance  and  appeal — "  humble 
to  God,  haughty  to  man  " — which  pervades  the 
next  three  poems,  the  meditative  and  studious 
imagination  of  the  poet  passes  into  the  fuller  light 
and  larger  air  of  thought  which  imbues  and  in- 
forms with  immortal  life  every  line  of  the  great 
religious  poem  called  Pleiirs  dans  la  unit.  In 
this  he  touches  the  highest  point  of  poetic  med- 
itation, as  in  the  epilogue  to  the  Chdtiments, 
written  four  months  earlier,  he  had  touched  the 
highest  point  of  poetic  rapture  possible  to  the 
most  ardent  of  believers  in  his  faith  and  the  most 
unapproachable  master  of  his  art.  Where  all  is 
so  lofty  in  its  coherence  of  construction,  so  per- 
fect in  its  harmony  of  composition,  it  seems  pre- 
sumptuous to  indicate  any  special  miracle  of  in- 
spired workmanship:  yet,  as  Hugo  in  his  various 
notes  on  mediaeval  architecture  was  wont  to 
select  for  exceptional  attention  and  peculiar  el- 
oquence of  praise  this  or  that  part  or  point  of 
some  superb  and  harmonious  building,  so  am  I 
tempted  to  dwell  for  a  moment  on  the  sublime 
imagination,  the  pathetic  passion,  of  the  verses 
which  render  into  music  the  idea  of  a  terrene  and 
material  purgatory,  with  its  dungeons  of  flint  and 
cells   of  clay  wherein  the  spirit  imprisoned   and 


96  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

imbedded  may  envy  the  life  and  covet  the  suffer- 
ing of  the  meanest  animal  that  toils  on  earth;  and 
to  set  beside  this  wonderful  passage  that  other 
which  even  in  a  poem  so  thoroughly  imbued  with 
hope  and  faith  finds  place  and  voice  for  expression 
of  the  old  mysterious  and  fantastic  horror  of  the 
grave,  more  perfect  than  ever  any  mediaeval 
painter  or  sculptor  could  achieve. 

Le  soir  vient;  rhorizon  s'emplit  d'inquictude; 
L'herbe  tremble  at  bruit  comrae  une  multitude; 

Le  fleuve  blanc  reluit; 
Le  paysage  obscur  prend  les  veinesdes  marbres; 
Ces  hydres  que,  le  jour,  on  appelle  des  arbres, 

Se  tordent  dans  la  nuit. 

Le  ^nort  est  seul.     II  sent  la  nuit  qui  le  devore. 
Quand  nait  le  doux  matii,  tout  I'azur  de  I'aurore, 

Tous  ses  rayons  si  beaux. 
Tout  Tamourdes  oiseaux  ei  leurs  chansons  sans  nombre, 
Vent  aux  berceaux  dores  ;  et,  la  nuit,  toute  Tombre 

Aboutit  aux  tombeaux. 
II  entend  des  soupirs  dans  les  fosses  voisines  ; 
II  sent  la  chevelure  affreuse  des  racines 

Entrer  dans  son  cercueil ; 
II  est  I'etre  vaincu  dent  s'empare  la  chose  ; 
II  sent  un  doigt  obscur,  sous  sa  paupiere  close, 

Lui  retirer  son  oeil. 
II  a  froid ;  car  le  soir  qui  mele  a  son  haleine 
Les  tenebres,  I'horreur,  le  spectre  et  le  phalene, 

Glacc  ces  durs  grabats  ; 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  97 

Le  cadavre,  lie  de  bandelettes  blanches, 
Grelotte,  et  dans  sa  biere  entend  les  quatre  planches 
Qui  lui  parlent  tout  bas. 

L'une  dit : — Je  fermais  ton  coffre-fort. — Et  I'autre 
Dit : — J'ai  servi  de  porte  au  toit  qui  fut  le  notre. — 

L'autre  dit : — Aux  beaux  jours, 
La  table  oia  rit  I'ivresse  et  que  le  vin  encombre, 
C  etait  moi. — L'autre  dit  : — J'etais  le  chevet  sombre 

Du  lit  de  tes  amours. 

Among  all  the  poems  which  follow,  some  ex- 
quisite in  their  mystic  tenderness  as  the  elegiac 
stanzas  on  Claire  and  the  appealing  address  to  a 
friend  unknown  {A  celle  qui  est  voilee'),  others 
possessed  with  the  same  faith  and  wrestling  with 
the  same  questions  as  beset  and  sustained  the 
writer  of  the  poem  at  which  we  have  just  rapidly 
and  reverently  glanced,  there  are  three  at  least 
which  demand  at  any  rate  one  passing  word  of 
homage.  The  solemn  song  of  meditation  "  at  the 
window  by  night  "  seems  to  me  to  render  in  its 
first  six  lines  the  aspects  and  sounds  of  sea  and 
cloud  and  wind  and  trees  and  stars  with  an  utter- 
ly incomparable  magic  of  interpretation. 

Les  ^toiles,  points  d'or,  percent  les  branches  noires ; 
Le  flot  huileux  et  lourd  decompose  ses  moires 

Sur  I'ocean  blemi  ; 
Les  nuages  ont  I'air  d'oiseaux  prenant  la  fuite  ; 


98  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

Par  moments  le  vent  parle,  et  dit  des  mots  sans  suite, 
Comme  un  homme  endormi. 

No  poet  but  one  could  have  written  the  three 
stanzas,  so  full  of  infinite  sweetness  and  awe,  in- 
scribed '•  to  the  angels  who  see  us." 

— Passant,  qu'es-tu  ?  j^  te  connais. 
Mais,  etant  spectre,  ombre  et  nuage, 
Tu  n'as  plus  de  sexe  ni  d'age. 
— Je  suis  ta  mere,  et  je  venais  ! 

— Et  toi  dont  I'aile  hesite  et  brille, 
Dont  I'oeil  est  noye  de  douceur, 
Qu'es-iu,  passant? — Je  suis  ta  soeur. 
— Et  toi,  qu'es-tu  ? — Je  suis  ta  fiUe. 

— Et  toi,  qu'es-tu,  passant  ? — Je  suis 
Celle  a  qui  tu  disais  :  Je  t'aime  ! 
— Et  toi  ? — Je  suis  ton  ame  meme. — 
Oh  !  cachez-moi,  profondes  nuits  ! 

Nor  could  any  other  hand  have  achieved  the 
pathetic  perfection  of  the  verses  in  which  just 
thirty  years  since,  twelve  years  to  a  day  after  the 
loss  of  his  daughter,  and  fifteen  years  to  a  day 
before  the  return  of  liberty  which  made  possible 
the  return  of  Victor  Hugo  to  France,  his  claims 
to  the  rest  into  which  he  now  has  entered,  and 
his  reasons  for  desiring  the  attainment  of  that 
rest,  found  utterance  unexcelled  for  divine  and 
deep  simplicity  by  any  utterance  of  man  on  earth, 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  99 

EN  FRAPPANT  A  UNE  PORTE. 

J'ai  perdu  mon  pere  et  ma  mere, 
Mon  premier-ne,  bien  jeune,  helas  I 
Et  pour  moi  la  nature  entiere 
Sonne  le  glas. 

Je  dormais  entre  mes  deux  freres; 
Enfants,  noii5  etions  trois  oiseaux; 
Helas !  le  sort  change  en  deux  bieres 
Leurs  deux  berceaux. 

Je  t'ai  perdue,  6  fille  chere, 
Toi  qui  remplis,  6  mon  orgueil, 
Tout  mon  destin  de  la  lumiere 
De  ton  cercueil  ! 

J'ai  su  monier,  j'ai  su  descendre. 
J'ai  vu  I'aubc  et  I'ombre  en  mes  cieux. 
J'ai  connu  la  pourpre,  et  la  cendre 
Qui  me  va  mieux. 

J'ai  connu  les  ardeurs  profondes, 
J'ai  connu  les  sombres  amours; 
j'ai  vu  fuir  les  ailes,  les  ondes, 
Les  vents,  les  jours. 

J'ai  sur  ma  tete  des  orfraies; 
Jai  sur  tous  mes  travaux  raffront, 
Au  pied  la  poudre,  au  coeur  des  plaies, 
L'epine  au  front. 

J'ai  des  pleurs  a  mon  oeil  qui  pense, 
Des  trous  a  ma  robe  en  lambeau; 
Je  n'ai  rien  a  la  conscience; 
Ouvre,  lombeau. 


loo  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

Last  comes  the  magnificent  and  rapturous 
hymn  of  universal  redemption  from  suffering  as 
from  sin,  the  prophetic  vision  of  evil  absorbed  by 
good,  and  the  very  worst  of  spirits  transfigured 
into  the  likeness  of  the  very  best,  in  which  the 
daring  and  indomitable  faith  of  the  seer  finds 
dauntless  and  supreme  expression  in  choral  har- 
monies of  unlimited  and  illimitable  hope.  The 
epilogue  which  dedicates  the  book  to  the  daugh- 
ter whose  grave  was  now  forbidden  ground  to 
her  father — so  long  wont  to  keep  there  the  au- 
tumnal anniversary  of  his  mourning — is  the  very 
crown  and  flower  of  the  immortal  work  which  it 
inscribes,  if  we  may  say  so,  rather  to  the  presence 
than  to  the  memory  of  the  dead. 

Not  till  the  thirtieth  year  from  the  publication 
of  these  two  volumes  was  the  inexhaustible  labor 
of  the  spirit  which  inspired  them  to  cease  for  a 
moment — and  then,  among  us  at  least,  for  ever. 
Three  years  afterwards  appeared  the  first  series 
of  the  Legende  des  Siccles,  to  be  followed  nine- 
teen years  later  by  the  second,  and  by  the  final 
complementary  volume  six  years  after  that:  so 
that  between  the  inception  and  the  conclusion  of 
the  greatest  single  work  accomplished  in  the 
course  of  our  century  a  quarter  of  that  century 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.         loi 

had  elapsed — with  stranger  and  more  tragic  evo- 
lution of  events  than  any  poet  or  any  seer  could 
have  foretold  or  foreseen  as  possible.  Three 
years  again  from  this  memorable  date  appeared 
the  great  epic  and  tragic  poem  of  contemporary 
life  and  of  eternal  humanity  which  gave  us  all  the 
slowly  ripened  fruit  of  the  studies  and  emotions, 
the  passions  and  the  thoughts,  the  aspiration  and 
the  experience,  brought  finally  to  their  full  and 
perfect  end  in  Les  Miserables.  As  the  key-note 
of  Notre-Dame  de  Paris  was  doom — the  human 
doom  of  suffering  to  be  nobly  or  ignobly  en- 
dured— so  the  key-note  of  its  author's  next  ro- 
mance was  redemption  by  acceptance  of  suffering 
and  discharge  of  duty  in  absolute  and  entire 
obedience  to  the  utmost  exaction  of  conscience 
when  it  calls  for  atonement,  of  love  when  it  calls 
for  sacrifice  of  all  that  makes  life  more  endurable 
than  death.  It  is  obvious  that  no  account  can 
here  be  given  of  a  book  which  if  it  required  a  sen- 
tence would  require  a  volume  to  express  the 
character  of  its  quality  or  the  variety  of  its  excel- 
lence— the  one  unique,  the  latter  infinite  as  the 
unique  and  infinite  spirit  whose  intelligence  and 
whose  goodness  gave  it  life. 

Two  years  after  Lcs  Miserables    appeared  the 


I02  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

magnificent  book  of  meditations  on  the  mission 
of  art  in  the  world,  on  the  duty  of  human  thought 
towards  humanity,  inscribed  by  Victor  Hugo  with 
the  name  of  William  Shakespeare.  To  allow 
that  it  throws  more  light  on  the  greatest  genius 
of  our  own  century  than  on  the  greatest  genius 
of  the  age  of  Shakespeare  is  not  to  admit  that  it 
is  not  rich  in  valuable  and  noble  contemplations 
or  suggestions  on  the  immediate  subject  of 
Shakespeare's  work;  witness  the  admirably 
thoughtful  and  earnest  remarks  on  Macbeth,  the 
admirably  passionate  and  pathetic  reflections  on 
Lear.  The  splendid  eloquence  and  the  heroic 
enthusiasm  of  Victor  Hugo  never  found  more 
noble  and  sustained  expression  than  in  this  vol- 
ume— the  spontaneous  and  inevitable  expansion 
of  a  projected  preface  to  his  son's  incomparable 
translation  of  Shakespeare.  The  preface  actually 
prefixed  to  it  is  admirable  for  concision,  for  in- 
sight, and  for  grave  historic  humor.  It  appeared 
a  year  after  the  book  which  (so  to  speak)  had 
grown  out  of  it;  and  in  the  same  year  appeared 
the  Chansons  des  Rues  et  des  Bois.  The  miracu- 
lous dexterity  of  touch,  the  dazzling  mastery  of 
metre,  the  infinite  fertility  in  variations  on  the 
same   air  of  frolic    and    thoughtful  fancy,  would 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  103 

not  apparently  allow  the  judges  of  the  moment 
to  perceive  or  to  appreciate  the  higher  and 
deeper  qualities  displayed  in  this  volume  of  lyric 
idyls.  The  prologue  is  a  superb  example  of 
the  power  peculiar  to  its  author  above  all  other 
poets;  the  power  of  seizing  on  some  old  symbol 
or  image  which  may  have  been  in  poetic  use  ever 
since  verse  dawned  upon  the  brain  of  man,  and 
informing  it  again  as  with  life,  and  transforming 
it  anew  as  by  fire.  Among  innumerable  exercises 
and  excursions  of  dainty  but  indefatigable  fancy 
there  are  one  or  two  touches  of  a  somewhat 
deeper  note  than  usual  which  would  hardly  be 
misplaced  in  the  gravest  and  most  ambitious 
works  of  imaginative  genius.  The  twelve  lines 
(of  four  syllables  each)  addressed  A  la  belle  bn- 
perieiise  are  such,  for  example,  as  none  but  a 
great  poet  of  passion,  a  master  of  imaginative 
style,  could  by  any  stroke  of  chance  or  at  any 
cost  of  toil  have  written. 

L'amour,  panique 
De  la  raison, 
Se  communique 
Par  le  frisson. 

Laissez-moi  dire, 
N  accordez  rien. 


104  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

Si  je  soupire, 
Chantez,  c'est  bien. 

Si  je  demeure, 
Triste,  a  vos  pieds, 
Et  si  je  pleure, 
C'est  bien,  riez. 

Un  homme  semble 
Souvent  trompeur. 
Mais  si  je  tremble, 
Belle,  ayez  pour. 

The  sound  of  the  songs  of  a  whole  woodland 
seems  to  ring  like  audible  spring  sunshine  through 
the  adorable  song  of  love  and  youth  rejoicing 
among  the  ruins  of  an  abbey. 

Seuls  tous  deux,  ravis,  chantants  ! 

Comme  on  s'aime  ! 
Comme  on  cueille  le  printemps 

Que  Dieu  seme  ! 

Quels  rires  etincelants 

Dans  ces  ombres 
Pleinesjadis  de  fronts  blancs, 

De  coeurs  sombres  ! 

On  est  tout  frais  mari6s. 

On  s'envoie 
Les  charmants  cris  varies 

De  la  joie. 

Purs  ebats  meles  au  vent 
Qui  frissonne  ! 


THE  ]yORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.         105 

Gaites  que  le  noir  couvent 
Assaisonne ! 

On  effeuille  des  jasmins 

Sur  la  pierre 
Oil  I'abbesse  joint  ses  mains 

En  priere. 

Ses  tombeaux,  de  croix  marqu6s, 

Font  parti  e 
De  ces  jeux,  un  peu  piques 

Par  I'ortie. 

Or  se  cherche,  on  se  poursuit, 

On  sent  croitre 
Ton  aube,  amour,  dans  la  nuit 

Du  vieux  cloitre. 

On  s'en  va  se  becquetant, 

On  s'adore, 
On  s'embrasse  a  chaque  instant, 

Puis  encore, 

Sous  les  piliers,  les  arceaux, 

Et  les  marbres. 
C'est  I'histoire  des  oiseaux 

Dans  les  arbres. 

The  inexhaustible  exuberance  of  fancies  lav- 
ished on  the  study  of  the  natural  church,  built  by 
the  hawthorn  and  the  nettle  in  the  depth  of  the 
living  wood,  with  foliage  and  wind  and  flowers, 
leaves  the  reader  not  unfit  for  such  readins:  act- 


io6  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

ually  dazzled  with  delight.  In  a  fiar  different 
key,  the  Souvenir  des  vicillcs  giicrres  is  one  of 
Hugo's  most  pathetic  and  characteristic  studies 
of  homely  and  heroic  life.  The  dialogue  which 
follows,  between  the  irony  of  scepticism  and  the 
enthusiasm  of  reason,  on  the  progressive  ascen- 
sion of  mankind,  is  at  once  sublime  and  subdued 
in  the  fervent  tranquillity  of  its  final  tone  :  and 
the  next  poem,  on  the  so-called  "  great  age  "  and 
its  dwarf  of  a  Caesar  with  the  sun  for  a  periwig, 
has  in  it  a  whole  volume  of  history  and  of  satire 
condensed  into  nine  stanzas  of  four  lines  of  five 
syllables  apiece. 

LE   GRAND    SikCLE. 

Ce  siecle  a  la  forme 
D'un  monstrueux  char. 
Sa  croissance  enorme 
Sous  un  nain  cesar. 

Son  air  de  prodige, 
Sa  gloire  qui  ment, 
Melent  le  vertige 
A  r^crasement. 

Louvois  pour  ministre, 
Scarron  pour  griffon, 
C'est  un  chant  sinistre 
Sur  un  air  bouffon. 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  107 

Sur  sa  double  roue 
Le  grand  char  descend; 
L'une  est  dans  la  boue, 
L'autre  est  dans  le  sang. 

La  mort  au  carrosse 
Attelle— ou  va-t-il? — 
Lavrilliere  atroce, 
Roquelaure  vil. 

Comme  un  geai  dans  I'arbre, 
Le  roi  s'y  tient  fier; 
Son  cceur  est  de  marbre. 
Son  ventre  est  de  chair. 

On  a  pour  sa  nuque 
Et  son  front  vermeil 
Fait  une  perruque 
Avec  le  soleil. 

II  regne  et  vegete, 
Effrayant  zero 
Sur  qui  se  projette 
L'ombre  du  bourreau. 

Ce  trone  est  la  tombe; 
Et  sur  le  pave 
Quelque  chose  en  tombe 
Qu'on  n'a  point  lave. 

The  exquisite  poem  on  the  closure  of  the  church 
already  described  for  the  winter  is  as  radiant  with 
humor  as  with  tenderness:   and  the  epilogue  re- 


io8  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

sponds  in  cadences  of  august  antiphony  to  the 
moral  and  imaginative  passion  which  imbues 
with  life  and  fire  the  magnificent  music  of  the 
prologue. 

In  the  course  of  the  next  four  years  Victor 
Hugo  published  the  last  two  great  works  which 
were  to  be  dated  from  the  haven  of  his  exile.  It 
would  be  the  very  ineptitude  of  impertinence  for 
any  man's  presumption  to  undertake  the  classifi- 
cation or  registry  of  his  five  great  romances  in 
positive  order  of  actual  merit:  but  I  may  perhaps 
be  permitted  to  say  without  fear  of  deserved  re- 
buke that  none  is  to  me  personally  a  treasure  of 
greater  price  than  Les  Travaillejirs  de  la  Mcr. 
The  splendid  energy  of  the  book  makes  the  su- 
perhuman energy  of  the  hero  seem  not  only  pos- 
sible but  natural,  and  his  triumph  over  all  phys- 
ical impossibilities  not  only  natural  but  inevitable. 
Indeed,  when  glancing  at  the  animadversions  of 
a  certain  sort  of  critics  on  certain  points  or  pas- 
sages in  this  and  in  the  next  romance  of  its 
author,  I  am  perpetually  inclined  to  address 
them  in  the  spirit — were  it  worth  while  to  ad- 
dress them  in  any  wise  at  all — after  the  fashion 
if  not  after  the  very  phrase  of  Mirabeau's  reply 
to   a  less   impertinent   objector.     Victor    Hugo's 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  109 

acquaintance  with  navigation  or  other  sciences 
may  or  may  not  have  been  as  imperfect  as 
Shakespeare's  acquaintance  with  geography  and 
natural  history;  the  knowledge  of  such  a- man's 
ignorance  or  inaccuracy  in  detail  is  in  either  case 
of  exactly  equal  importance:  and  the  importance 
of  such  knowledge  is  for  all  men  of  sense  and 
candor  exactly  equivalent  to  zero. 

Between  the  tragedy  of  Gilliatt  and  the  tragedy 
of  Gwynplaine  Victor  Hugo  published  nothing 
but  the  glorious  little  poem  on  the  slaughter  of 
Mentana,  called  La  Voix  de  Guernesey,  and  (in 
the  same  year)  the  eloquent  and  ardent  effusion 
of  splendid  and  pensive  enthusiasm  prefixed  to 
the  manual  or  guide-book  which  appeared  on  the 
occasion  of  the  international  exhibition  at  Paris 
three  years  before  the  collapse  of  the  government 
which  then  kept  out  of  France  the  Frenchmen 
most  regardful  of  her  honor  and  their  own.  In 
the  year  preceding  that  collapse  he  published 
L" Homme  qui  Kit;  a  book  which  those  who  read 
it  aright  have  always  ranked  and  will  always 
rank  among  his  masterpieces.  A  year  and  eight 
months  after  the  fall  of  the  putative  Bonaparte 
he  published  the  terrible  register  oi L Annee  Ter- 
rible.   More  sublime  wisdom,  more  compassionate 


no  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

equity,  more  loyal  self-devotion  never  found  ex- 
pression in  verse  of  more  varied  and  impassioned 
and  pathetic  magnificence.  The  memorial  poem 
in  which  Victor  Hugo  so  royally  repaid,  with 
praise  beyond  all  price  couched  in  verse  beyond 
all  praise,  the  loyal  and  constant  devotion  of 
Thcophile  Gautier,  bears  the  date  of  All  Souls' 
Day  in  the  autumn  of  1872.  For  tenderness  and 
nobility  of  mingling  aspiration  and  recollection, 
recollection  of  combatant  and  triumphant  youth, 
aspiration  towards  the  serene  and  sovereign  as- 
cension out  of  age  through  death,  these  majestic 
lines  are  worthy  not  merely  of  eternal  record,  but 
far  more  than  that — of  a  distinct  and  a  distin- 
guished place  among  the  poems  of  Victor  Hugo. 
They  are  not  to  be  found  in  the  edition  ne 
varietur:  which,  I  must  needs  repeat,  will  have 
to  be  altered  or  modified  by  more  variations  than 
one  before  it  can  be  accepted  as  a  sufficient  or 
standard  edition  of  the  complete  and  final  text. 
In  witness  of  this  I  cite  the  closing  lines  of  a 
poem  now  buried  in  "  the  tomb  of  Theophile 
Gautier" — a  beautiful  volume  which  has  long 
been  out  of  print. 

Ami,  je  sens  du  sort  la  sombre  plenitude; 
J'ai  commence  la  mort  par  dc  la  solitude, 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  1 1 1 

Je  vois  mon  profond  soir  vaguement  s'etoiler. 

Voici  I'heure  ou  je  vais,  aussi  nioi,  m'en  aller. 

Mon  fil  troplong  frissonne  et  louche  presqueau  glaive; 

Le  vent  qui  t'emporta  doucement  me  souleve, 

Et  je  vais  suivre  ceux  qui  m'aimaient,  moi  banni. 

Leur  ceil  fixe  m'attire  au  fond  de  I'infini. 

Yy  cours.      Ne  fermez  pas  la  porte  funeraire. 

Passons,  car  c'est  la  loi:  nul  ne  peut  s'y  soustraire; 

Tout  penche;  et  ce  grand  siecle  avec  tons  ses  rayons 

Entre  en  cette  ombre  immense  oia,  pales,  nous  fuyons. 

Oh  !  quel  farouche  bruit  font  dans  le  crepuscule 

Les  chenes  qu'on  abat  pour  le  bucher  d'Hercule  I 

Les  chevaux  de  la  IMort  se  mettent  a  hennir, 

Et  sont  joyeux,  car  I'age  eclatant  va  finir; 

Ce  siecle  altier  qui  sut  dompter  le  vent  contraire. 

Expire  .  .  . — O  Gauiier,  toi,  leur  egal  et  leur  frere, 

Tu  pars  apres  Dumas,  Lamartine  et  IMusset. 

L'onde  antique  est  tarie  oii  Ton  rajeunissait; 

Comme  il  n'est  plus  de  Styx  il  n'est  plus  de  Jouvence. 

Le  dur  faucher  avec  sa  large  lame  avance 

Pensif  et  pas  a  pas  vers  le  reste  du  ble; 

C'est  mon  tour;  et  la  nuit  emplit  mon  oeil  trouble 

Qui,  devinant,  helas,  I'avenir  des  colombes, 

Pleure  sur  des  berceaux  et  sourit  a  des  tombes. 

Two  years  after  the  year  of  terror,  the  poet 
who  had  made  its  memory  immortal  by  his  rec- 
ord of  its  changes  and  its  chances  gave  to  the 
world  his  heroic  and  epic  romance  of  Quatrevingt- 
trcize;  instinct   with   all   the  passion  of  a  deeper 


112  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

and  wider  chivalry  than  that  of  old,  and  touched 
with  a  more  than  Homeric  tenderness  for  mother- 
hood and  childhood.  This  book  was  written  in 
the  space  of  five  months  and  twenty-seven  days. 
The  next  year  witnessed  only  the  collection  of 
the  second  series  of  his  Actes  ct  Paroles  {Pendant 
rExil),  and  the  publication  of  two  brief  and  mem- 
orable pamphlets:  the  one  a  simple  and  pathetic 
record  of  the  two  beloved  sons  taken  from  him  in 
such  rapid  succession,  the  other  a  terse  and  earn- 
est plea  with  the  judges  who  had  spared  the  life 
of  a  marshal  condemned  on  a  charge  of  high 
treason  to  spare  likewise  the  life  of  a  private 
soldier  condemned  for  a  transgression  of  military 
discipline.  Most  readers  will  be  glad  to  remem- 
ber that  on  this  occasion  at  least  the  voice  of  the 
intercessor  was  not  uplifted  in  vain.  A  year  after- 
wards he  published  the  third  series  of  Actes  et 
Paroles  {Depiiis  PExil),  with  a  prefatory  essay 
full  of  noble  wisdom,  of  pungent  and  ardent 
scorn,  of  thoughtful  and  composed  enthusiasm, 
on  the  eternal  contrast  and  the  everlasting  bat- 
tle between  the  spirit  of  clerical  Rome  and  the 
spirit  of  republican  Paris. 

"  Moi  qu'un  petit  enfant  rend  tout  a  fait    stu- 
pide,"  I  do  not  propose  to  undertake  a  review  of 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  113 

L  Art  d'etre  Grandpere.  It  must  suffice  here  to  reg- 
ister the  fact  that  the  most  absolutely  and  adora- 
bly beautiful  book  ever  written  appeared  a  year 
after  the  volume  just  mentioned,  and  some  months 
after  the  second  series  of  the  Le'gende  des  Siecles; 
that  there  is  not  a  page  in  it  which  is  not  above 
all  possible  eulogy  or  thanksgiving;  that  nothing 
was  ever  conceived  more  perfect  than  such  poems 
— to  take  but  a  small  handful  for  samples — as  Un 
manque,  La  sieste,  Glioses  dii  soir,  Ce  que  dit  le 
public  (at  the  Jardin  des  Plantes  or  at  the  Zo- 
ological Gardens;  ages  of  public  ranging  from  five, 
which  is  comparatively  young,  to  seven,  which  is 
positively  old),  CJiant  siir  le  berceau,  the  song  for 
a  round  dance  of  children,  Le  pot  cassc.  La  viise  en 
liberte,  Jeanne  endormie,  the  delicious  Chanson 
de  grandpere,  the  glorious  Chanson  dancetre,  or 
the  third  of  the  divine  and  triune  poems  on  the 
sleep  of  a  little  child;  that  after  reading  these — 
to  say  nothing  of  the  rest — it  seems  natural  to  feel 
as  though  no  other  poet  had  ever  known  so  fully 
or  enjoyed  so  wisely  or  spoken  so  sweetly  and  so 
well  the  most  precious  of  truths,  the  loveliest  of 
loves,  the  sweetest  and  the  best  of  doctrines. 

The  first  of  all  to  see   the   light   appeared  in  a 
magazine  which  has  long  ago  collapsed  under  the 


114  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

influence  of  far  other  writers  than  the  greatest  of 
the  century.  Every  word  of  the  thirty-eight  lines 
which  compose  La  Sicstc  de  Jeanne — if  any  speech 
or  memory  of  man  endure  so  long — will  be  trea- 
sured as  tenderly  by  generations  as  remote  from 
the  writer's  as  now  treasure  up  with  thankful  won- 
der and  reverence  every  golden  fragment  and  jew- 
elled spar  from  the  wreck  of  SimOnides  or  of 
Sappho.  It  has  all  the  subtle  tenderness  which 
invests  the  immortal  song  of  Danae;  and  the 
union  of  perfect  grace  with  living  passion,  as  it 
were  the  suffusion  of  human  flesh  and  blood  with 
heavenly  breath  and  fire,  brings  back  once  again 
upon  our  thoughts  the  name  which  is  above  every 
name  in  lyric  song.  There  is  not  one  line  which 
could  have  been  written  and  set  where  it  stands 
by  the  hand  of  any  lesser  than  the  greatest  among 
poets.  For  once  even  the  high  priest  and  even 
the  high  priestess  of  baby-worship  who  have  made 
their  names  immortal  among  our  own  by  this 
especial  and  most  gracious  attribute — even  Wil- 
liam Blake  and  Christina  Rossetti  for  once  are 
distanced  in  the  race  of  song,  on  their  own  sweet 
ground,  across  their  own  peculiar  field  of  Para- 
dise. Not  even  in  the  pastures  that  heard  his 
pipe  keep  time  to  the  "  Songs  of  Innocence,"  or 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  115 

on  the  "  wet  bird-haunted  English  lawn "  set 
ringing  as  from  nursery  windows  at  summer  sun- 
rise to  the  faultless  joyous  music  and  pealing  bird- 
like laughter  of  her  divine  "  Sing-Song,"  has  there 
sounded  quite  such  a  note  as  this  from  the  heaven 
of  heavens  in  which  little  babies  are  adored  by 
great  poets,  the  frailest  by  the  most  potent  of 
divine  and  human  kind.  And  above  the  work  in 
this  lovely  line  of  all  poets  in  all  time  but  one, 
there  sits  and  smiles  eternally  the  adorable  baby 
who  helps  us  for  ever  to  forget  all  passing  pervers- 
ities of  Christianized  socialism  or  bastard  Caesar- 
ism  which  disfigure  and  diminish  the  pure  propor- 
tions and  the  noble  charm  of  "Aurora  Leigh." 
Even  the  most  memorable  children  born  to  art 
in  Florence,  begotten  upon  stone  or  canvas  by 
Andrea  del  Sarto  or  by  Luca  della  Robbia's  very 
self,  must  yield  to  that  one  the  crown  of  sinless 
empire  and  the  palm  of  powerless  godhead  which 
attest  the  natural  mystery  of  their  omnipotence; 
and  which  haply  may  help  to  explain  why  no  ac- 
cumulated abominations  of  cruelty  and  absurdity 
which  inlay  the  record  of  its  history  and  in- 
crust  the  fabric  of  its  creed  can  utterly  corrode 
the  natal  beauty  or  corrupt  the  primal  charm  of 
a  faith  which  centres  at  its  opening  round  the  wor- 
ship of  a  new-born  child. 


ii6  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

The  most  accurate  and  affectionate  description 
that  I  ever  saw  or  heard  given  of  a  baby's  incom- 
parable smile,  when  graciously  pleased  to  permit 
with  courtesy  and  accept  with  kindness  the  votive 
touch  of  a  reverential  finger  on  its  august  little 
cheek,  was  given  long  since  in  the  text  accompa- 
nying a  rich  and  joyous  design  of  childish  revel  by 
Richard  Doyle.  A  baby  in  arms  is  there  contem- 
plating the  riotous  delights  of  its  elders,  fallen 
indeed  from  the  sovereign  state  of  infancy,  but 
not  yet  degenerate  into  the  lower  life  of  adults, 
with  that  bland  and  tacit  air  of  a  large-minded 
and  godlike  tolerance  which  the  devout  observer 
will  not  fail  to  have  remarked  in  the  aspect  of 
babies  when  unvexed  and  unincensed  by  any  cross 
accident  or  any  human  shortcoming  on  the  part 
of  their  attendant  ministers.  Possibly  a  hand 
which  could  paint  that  inexpressible  smile  might 
not  fail  also  of  the  ability  to  render  in  mere  words 
some  sense  of  the  ineffable  quality  which  rests 
upon  every  line  and  syllable  of  this  most  divine 
poem.  There  are  lines  in  it — but  after  all  this  is 
but  an  indirect  way  of  saying  that  it  is  a  poem  by 
Victor  Hugo — which  may  be  taken  as  tests  of  the 
uttermost  beauty,  the  extreme  perfection,  the  su- 
preme capacity  and  charm,  to  which  the  language 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  1 1 7 

of  men  can  attain.  It  might  seem  as  if  the  Fates 
could  not  allow  two  men  capable  of  such  work  to 
live  together  in  one  time  of  the  world;  and  that 
Shelley  therefore  had  to  die  in  his  thirtieth  year 
as  soon  as  Hugo  had  attained  his  twentieth. 

Elle  fait  au  milieu  du  jour  son  petit  somme; 

Car  I'enfant  a  besoin  du  reve  plus  que  Thomme, 

Cette  terre  est  si  laide  alors  qu'on  vient  du  ciel ! 

L'enfant  cherche  a  revoir  Cherubin,  Ariel, 

Les  camarades,  Puck,  Titania,  Ics  fees, 

Et  ses  mains  quand  il  dort  sont  par  Dieu  rechauffees. 

Oh  !  comme  nous  serions  surpris  si  nous  voyions, 

Au  fond  de  ce  sommeil  sacre,  plein  de  rayons, 

Ces  paradis  ouverts  dans  I'ombre,  ct  ces  passages 

D'etoiles  qui  font  signe  aux  enfants  d'etre  sages, 

Ces  apparitions,  ces  eblouissements  ! 

Done,  a  I'heure  ou  les  feux  du  soleil  sont  calmants, 

Quand  tout  la  nature  ecoute  et  se  recueille. 

Vers  midi,  quand  les  nids  se  taisent,  quand  la  feuille 

La  plus  tremblante  oublie  un  instant  de  fremir, 

Jeanne  a  cette  habitude  aimable  de  dormir; 

Et  la  mere  un  moment  respire  et  se  repose, 

Car  on  se  lasse,  meme  a  scrvir  une  rose. 

Ses  beaux  petits  pieds  nus  dont  le  pas  est  peu  sur 

Dorment;  et  son  berceau,  qu'entoure  un  vague  azur 

Ainsi  qu'une  aureole  entoure  une  immortelle, 

Semble  un  nuage  fait  avec  de  la  denielle; 

On  croit,  en  la  voyant  dans  ce  frais  berceau-la, 

Voir  une  lueur  rose  au  fond  d'un  falbala; 

On  la  contcmple,  on  rit,  on  sent  fuir  la  tristesse. 


ii8  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO, 

Et  c'est  un  astre,  ayant  de  plus  la  petitesse; 
L'ombre,  amoreuse  d'elle,  a  I'air  de  I'adorer; 
Le  vent  retient  son  souffle  et  n'ose  respirer. 
Soudain  dans  1 'humble  et  chaste  alcove  matemelle, 
Versant  tout  le  matin  qu'elle  a  dans  sv  prunelle, 
Elle  ouvre  la  paupiere,  etend  un  bras  charmant, 
Agite  un  pied,  puis  I'autre,  et,  si  divinement 
Que  des  fronts  dans  I'azur  se  penchent  pour  I'entendre, 
Elle  gazouille. .  . — Alors,  de  sa  voix  la  plus  tendre, 
Couvant  des  yeux  I'enfant  que  Dieu  fait  rayonner, 
Cherchant  le  plus  doux  nom  quelle  puisse  donner 
A  sa  joie,  a  son  ange  en  fleur,  a  sa  chimere: 
— Te  voila  reveillee,  horreur !  lui  dit  sa  mere. 

If  the  last  word  on  so  divine  a  subject  could 
ever  be  said,  it  surely  might  well  be  none  other 
than  this.  But  with  workmen  of  the  very  highest 
order  there  is  no  such  thing  as  a  final  touch,  a 
point  at  which  they  like  others  are  compelled  to 
draw  bridle,  a  summit  on  which  even  their  genius 
also  may  abide  but  while  a  man  takes  breath, 
and  halt  without  a  hope  or  aspiration  to  pass 
beyond  it. 

Far  different  in  the  promise  or  the  menace  of 
its  theme,  the  poet's  next  work,  issued  in  the  fol- 
lowing year,  was  one  in  spirit  with  the  inner  spirit 
of  this  book.  In  sublime  simplicity  of  conception 
and  in  sovereign  accomplishment  of  its  design, 
Le  Papc  is  excelled  by  no  poem  of  Hugo's  or  of 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  119 

man's.  In  the  glory  of  pure  pathos  it  is  perhaps 
excelled,  as  in  the  divine  long-suffering  of  all- 
merciful  wisdom  it  can  be  but  equalled,  by  the 
supreme  utterance  of  La  Pitie  Siipreme.  In  splen- 
dor of  changeful  music  and  imperial  magnificence 
of  illustration  the  two  stand  unsurpassed  for  ever, 
side  by  side.  A  third  poem, -attacking  at  once 
the  misbelief  or  rather  the  infidelity  which  studies 
and  rehearses  "  the  grammar  of  assent"  to  creeds 
and  articles  of  religion,  and  the  blank  disbelief  or 
denial  which  rejects  all  ideals  and  all  ideas  of 
spiritual  life,  is  not  so  rich  even  in  satire  as  in 
reason,  so  earnest  even  in  rejection  of  false  doc- 
trine as  in  assertion  of  free  belief.'  Upon  this 
book  no  one  can  hope  to  write  anything  so  nearly 
adequate  and  so  thoroughly  worth  reading  as  is 
the  tribute  paid  to  it  by  Theodore  de  Banville — 
the  Simonides  Melicertes  of  France. 

In  the  midst  of  our  confused  life,  turbulent  and  flat, 
bustling  and  indifferent,  where  books  and  plays,  dreams 
and  poems,  driven  down  a  wind  of  oblivion,  are  like  the 
leaves  which  November  sweeps  away,  and  fly  past,  without 
giving  us  time  to  tell  one  from  another,  in  a  vague  whirl 
and  rush,  at  times  there  appears  a  new  book  by  Victor 
Hugo,  and  lights  up,  resounds,  murmurs,  and  sings  at 
once  everything. 

The  shining,  sounding,  fascinating  verse,  with  its  thou- 


I20  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

sand  surprises  of  sound,  of  color,  of  harmony,  breaks 
forth  hke  a  rich  concert,  and  ever  newly  stirred,  dazzled 
and  astonished,  as  if  we  were  hearing  verses  for  the  first 
time,  we  remain  stupefied  with  wonder  before  the  persist- 
ent prodigy  of  the  great  seer,  the  great  thinker,  the  un- 
heard-of artist,  self-transfigured  without  ceasing,  always 
new  and  always  like  himself.  It  would  be  impertinent 
to  say  of  him  that  he  makes  progress;  and  yet  I  find  no 
other  word  to  express  the  fact  that  every  hour,  every 
minute,  he  adds  something  new,  something  yet  more 
exact  and  yet  more  caressing,  to  that  swing  of  syllables, 
that  melodious  play  of  rhyme  renascent  of  itself,  which  is 
the  grace  and  the  invincible  power  of  French  poetry, — if 
English  ears  could  but  learn  or  would  but  hear  it;  where- 
as usually  they  have  never  been  taught  even  the  rudi- 
ments of  French  prosody,  and  receive  the  most  perfect 
cadences  of  the  most  glorious  or  the  most  exquisite 
French  poetry  as  a  schoolboy  who  has  not  yet  learnt 
scansion  might  receive  the  melodies  of  Catullus  or  of 
Virgil. 

Let  me  be  forgiven  a  seeming  blasphemy;  but  since 
the  time  of  periphrasis  is  over  the  real  truih  of  things 
must  be  said  of  them.  Well,  then,  the  great  peril  of 
poclry  is  the  risk  it  runs  of  becoming  a  weariness:  for  it 
may  be  almost  sublime,  and  yet  perfectly  wearisome:  but, 
on  the  contrary,  with  all  its  bewildering  flight,  its  vast 
circumference,  and  the  rage  of  its  genius  grown  drunk 
with  things  immeasurable,  the  poetry  of  Victor  Hugo  is 
of  itself  amusing  into  the  bargain — amusing  as  a  fairy  tale, 
as  a  many-colored  festival,  as  a  lawless  and  charming 
comedy;  for  in  them  words  play  unexpected  parts,  take 
on  themselves  a  special  and  intense  life,  put  on  strange  or 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  121 

graceful  faces,  clash  one  against  another  either  cymbals  of 
gold  or  urns  of  crystal,  exchange  flashes  of  living  light 
and  dawn. 

And  let  no  one  suspect  in  my  choice  of  an  epithet  any 
idea  of  diminution;  a  garden-box  on  the  window-sill  may 
be  thoroughly  wearisome,  and  an  immense  forest  may  be 
amusing,  with  its  shades  wherein  the  nightingale  sings,  its 
giant  trees  with  the  blue  sky  showing  through  them,  its 
mossy  shelters  where  the  silver  brooklet  hums  its  tune 
through  the  moistened  greener}'.  Ay, — this  is  one  of  its 
qualities, — the  poetry  of  Hugo  can  be  read,  can  be  de- 
voured as  one  devours  a  new  novel,  because  it  is  varied, 
surprising,  full  of  the  unforeseen,  clear  of  commonplaces, 
like  nature  itself;  and  of  such  a  limpid  clearness  as  to  be 
within  the  reach  of  every  creature  who  can  read,  even  when 
it  soars  to  the  highest  summits  of  philosophy  and  ideal- 
ism. In  fact,  to  be  obscure,  confused,  unintelligible,  is 
not  a  rare  quality,  nor  one  difficult  to  acquire;  and  the 
first  fool  you  may  fall  in  with  can  easily  attain  to  it.  In 
this  magnificent  poem  which  has  just  appeared — as,  for 
that  matter,  in  all  his  other  poems — what  Victor  Hugo 
does  is  just  to  dispel  and  scatter  to  the  winds  of  heaven 
those  lessons,  those  fogs,  those  rubbish-heaps,  those  clouds 
of  dark  bewildered  words  with  which  the  sham  wise  men 
of  all  ages  have  overlaid  the  plain  evidence  of  truth. 

"  The  words  of  Mercury  are  harsh  after  the 
songs  of  Apollo  ";  and  I,  who  cannot  pretend  even 
to  the  gift  of  eloquence  proper  to  the  son  of  Maia, 
will  not  presume  to  add  a  word  of  less  valuable 
homage  to  the  choicer  tribute  of  Banville.     The 


122  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

three  poems  last  mentioned  were  respectively 
published  in  three  successive  years:  and  in  the 
same  year  with  Religions  et  Religion  Victor  Hugo 
published  a  fourth  volume,  L'Ane,  in  which  the 
questions  of  human  learning  and  of  human  train- 
ing were  handled  with  pathetic  ardor  and  sympa- 
thetic irony.  It  would  be  superfluous  if  not  inso- 
lent to  add  that  the  might  of  hand,  the  magic  of 
utterance,  the  sovereign  charm  of  sound,  and  the 
superb  expression  of  sense,  are  equal  and  incom- 
parable in  all. 

And  next  year  Victor  Hugo  gave  us  Les  Quatre 
VeJits  de  t Esprit.  In  the  first  division,  the  book 
of  satire,  every  page  bears  witness  that  the  hand 
which  wrote  the  CJidtiments  had  neither  lost  its 
strength  nor  forgotten  its  cunning;  it  is  full  of 
keen  sense,  of  wise  wrath,  of  brilliant  reason  and 
of  merciful  equity.  The  double  drama  which  fol- 
lows is  one  of  the  deepest  and  sweetest  and  rich- 
est in  various  effect  among  the  masterpieces  of  its 
author.  In  Margarita  we  breathe  again  the  same 
fresh  air  of  heroic  mountain-ranges  and  wood- 
lands inviolable,  of  winds  and  flowers  and  all  fair 
things  and  thoughts,  which  blows  through  all  the 
brighter  and  more  gracious  interludes  of  the  Le- 
gcnde  des  Siecles:  the  figures  of  Gallus,  the  liber- 


THE  WORK  OF  VIC  I  OR  HUGO.  123 

tine  by  philosophy,  and  Gunich,  the  philosopher 
of  profligacy — the  former  a  true  man  and  true 
lover  at  heart,  the  latter  a  cynic  and  a  courtier  to 
the  core — are  as  fresh  in  their  novelty  as  the  fig- 
ures of  noble  old  age  and  noble  young  love  are 
fresh  in  their  renewal  and  reimpression  of  types 
familiar  to  all  hearts  since  the  sunrise  of  Hernani. 
The  tragedy  which  follows  this  little  romantic 
comedy  is  but  the  more  penetrative  and  piercing 
in  its  pathos  and  its  terror  for  its  bitter  and  burn- 
ing vein  of  realism  and  of  humor.  The  lyric  book 
is  a  casket  of  jewels  rich  enough  to  outweigh  the 
whole  wealth  of  many  a  poet.  After  the  smiling 
song  of  old  times,  the  stately  song  of  to-day  with 
its  other  stars  and  its  other  roses,  in  sight  of  the 
shadow  where  grows  the  deathless  flower  of 
death,  pale  and  haggard,  with  its  shadowy  per- 
fume: the  song  of  all  sweet  waking  dreams  and 
visions,  and  sweetest  among  them  all  the  vision 
of  a  tyrant  loyally  slain:  the  song  on  hearing  a 
princess  sing,  sweeter  than  all  singing  and  simple 
as  "  the  very  virtue  of  compassion  ":  the  song  of 
evening  and  rest  from  trouble,  and  prayer  in  sor- 
row, and  hope  in  death:  the  many-colored  and 
sounding  song  of  seaside  winter  nights:  the  song 
of  three  nests,  the  reed-warbler's  and  the  mart- 


124  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

let's  made  with  moss  and  straw,  in  the  wall  or  on 
the  water,  and  love's  with  glances  and  smiles,  in 
the  lover's  inmost  heart:  the  song  of  the  watcher 
by  twilight  on  the  cliff,  which  strikes  a  note  after- 
wards repeated  and  prolonged  in  the  last  issue  of 
the  Lc'gcndc  des  Sieclcs,  full  of  mystery  and  mourn- 
ing and  fear  and  faith:  the  brief  deep  note  of  be- 
wildered sorrow  that  succeeds  it:  the  great  wild 
vision  of  death  and  night,  cast  into  words  which 
have  the  very  sound  of  wind  and  storm  and  water, 
the  very  shape  and  likeness  of  things  actually 
touched  or  seen:  the  soft  and  sublime  song  of 
dawn  as  it  rises  on  the  thinker  deep  sunk  in  med- 
itation on  death  and  on  life  to  come:  the  strange 
dialogue  underground,  grim  and  sweet,  between 
the  corpse  and  the  rose-tree:  the  song  of  exile  in 
May,  sweet  as  flowers  and  bitter  as  tears:  the 
lofty  poem  of  suffering  which  rejects  the  old  Ro- 
man refuge  of  stoic  suicide:  the  light  swift  song  of 
a  lover's  quarrel  between  the  earth  and  the  sun  in 
winter  time:  the  unspeakably  sweet  song  of  the 
daisy  that  smiles  at  coming  winter,  the  star  that 
smiles  at  coming  night,  the  soul  that  smiles  at 
coming  death:  the  most  pathetic  and  heroic  song 
of  all,  the  cry  of  exile  towards  the  graves  of  the 
beloved  over  sea,  that  weeps  and  is  not  weary: 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.         125 

the  simple  and  sublime  verses  on  the  mountain 
desolation  to  which  truth  and  conscience  were  the 
guides:  the  four  magnificent  studies  of  sea  and 
land,  Promenades  dans  les  rockers:  the  admirable 
verses  on  that  holy  mystery  of  terror  perceptible 
in  the  most  glorious  works  alike  of  nature  and  of 
poetry:  all  these  and  more  are  fitly  wound  up  by 
the  noble  hymn  on  planting  the  oak  of  the  United 
States  of  Europe  in  the  garden  of  the  house  of 
exile.  A  few  of  the  briefer  among  these  may  here 
be  taken  as  examples  of  a  gift  not  merely  une- 
qualled but  unapproached  by  any  but  the  great- 
est among  poets.  And  first  we  may  choose  the 
following  unsurpassable  psalm  of  evensong. 

Un  hymne  harmonieux  sort  des  feuilles  du  tremble; 

Les  voyageurs  craintifs,  qui  vont  la  nuit  ensemble, 

Haussent  la  voix  dans  I'ombre  oh  Ton  doit  se  hater 

Laissez  tout  ce  qui  tremble 

Chanter. 

Les  marins  fatigues  sommeillent  sur  le  gouffre. 
La  mer  bleue  ou  Vesuve  epand  ses  Acts  de  soufre 
Se  tait  des  qu'il  s'eteint,  et  cesse  de  gemir. 
Laissez  tout  ce  qui  souffre 
Dormir. 

Quand  la  vie  est  mauvaise  on  la  reve  meilleure. 
Les  yeux  en  pleurs  au  ciel  se  levent  a  toute  heure; 
L'espoir  vers  Dieu  se  tourne  et  Dieu  Ten  tend  crier. 


126  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

Laissez  tout  ce  qui  pleure 
Prier. 

C'est  pour  renaitre  ailleurs  qu'ici-bas  on  succombe. 
Tout  ce  qui  tourbillonne  appartient  a  la  tombe. 
11  faut  dans  le  grand  tout  tot  ou  tard  s'absorber. 
Laissez  tout  ce  qui  tombe 
Tomber ! 

Next,  we  may  take  two  songs  of  earlier  and  later 
life,  whose  contrast  is  perfect  concord. 

I. 

CHANSON  D'A  UTREFOIS. 
Jamais  elle  ne  raille, 
Etant  un  calme  esprit; 
Mais  toujours  elle  rit. — 
Voici  des  brins  de  mousse  avec  des  brins  de  paille; 
Fauvette  des  roseaux, 
Fais  ton  nid  sur  les  eaux. 

Quand  sous  la  clarte  douce 
Qui  sort  de  tes  beaux  yeux 
On  passe,  on  est  joyeux. — 
Voici  des  brins  de  paille  avec  des  brins  de  mousse; 
Martinet  de  I'azur, 
Fais  ton  nid  dans  mon  mur. 

Dans  I'aube  avril  se  mire, 
Et  les  rameaux  fleuris 
Sont  pleins  de  petits  oris. — 
Voici  de  son  regard,  voici  de  son  sourire; 
Amour,  6  doux  vainqueur, 
Fais  ton  nid  dans  moncoeur. 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO,  127 

II. 

CHANSON'  UA  UJOURUHUI. 

Je  disais: — Dieu  qu'aucun  suppliant  n'importune, 
Quand  vous  m'eprouverez  dans  votre  volonte, 
Laissez  mon  libre  choix  choisir  dans  la  fortune 
L'un  ou  I'autre  cote; 

Entre  un  riche  esclavage  et  la  pauvrete  franche 
Laissez-moi  choisir,  Dieu  du  cedre  et  du  roseau; 
Entre  Tor  de  la  cage  et  le  vert  de  la  branche 
Faites  juge  I'oiseau. — 

INIaintenant  je  suis  libre  et  la  nuit  me  reclame; 
J'ai  choisi  lapre  exil;  j'habite  un  bois  obscur; 
Mais  je  vols  s'<dlumer  les  etoiles  de  I'ame 
Dans  mon  sinistre  azur. 

If  this  can  be  surpassed  for  outward  and  inward 
sweetness,  the  following  poem  may  perhaps  have 
been  equaled  for  sensible  and  spiritual  terror  in 
the  range  of  lyric  song. 

EN  MARCH  ANT  LA  NUIT  DANS  UN  BOIS. 
I. 

II  grele,  il  pleut.     Neige  et  brume; 

Fondriere  a  chaque  pas. 

Le  torrent  veut,  crie,  ecume, 

Et  le  rocher  ne  veut  pas. 

Le  sabbat  a  notre  oreille 
Jette  ses  vagues  hourras. 
Un  fagot  sur  une  vieille 
Passe  en  agitant  les  bras. 


128  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

Passants  hideux,  claries  blanches; 
II  semble,  en  ces  noirs  chemins, 
Que  les  hommes  ont  des  branches. 
Que  les  arbres  ont  des  mains. 

II. 

On  entend  passer  un  coche, 
Le  lourd  coche  de  la  mort, 
II  vient,  il  roule,  il  approche, 
L'eau  hurle  et  la  bise  mord. 

Le  dur  cocher,  dans  la  plaine 
Aux  aspects  noirs  et  changeants, 
Conduit  sa  voiture  pleine 
De  toute  sorte  de  gens. 

Novembre  souffle,  la  terre 
Fremit,  la  bourrasque  fond; 
Les  fleches  du  sagittaire 
Sifflent  dans  le  ciel  profond. 

III. 
— Cocher,  d'ou  viens-tu?  dit  I'arbre. 
— Ou  vas-tu  ?  dit  l'eau  qui  fuit. 
Le  cocher  est  fait  de  marbre 
Et  le  coche  est  fait  de  nuit 

II  emporte  beaute,  gloire, 
Joie,  amour,  plaisirs  bruyants; 
La  voiture  est  toute  noire, 
Les  chevaux  sont  effrayants. 

L'arbreen  frissonnant  s'incline, 
L'eau  sent  les  joncs  se  dresser. 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  129 

Le  buisson  sur  la  col  line 
Grimpe  pour  le  voir  passer. 

IV. 

Le  brin  d'hcrbe  sur  la  roche, 
Le  nuage  dans  le  ciel, 
Regarde  marcher  ce  coche, 
Kt  croit  voir  rouler  Babel, 

Sur  sa  morne  silhouette, 
Baitant  de  I'ailea  grands  oris, 
Volenl  i'orage,  chouette, 
El  I'ombre,  chauve-souris. 

Vent  glace,  tu  nous  secoues  ! 
Le  char  roule,  et  I'oeil  tremblant, 
A  travers  ses  grandes  roues, 
Voit  un  crepuscule  blanc. 

V. 

La  nuit,  sinistre  merveille, 
Repand  son  effroi  sacre; 
Toute  la  foret  s'eveille, 
Cornme  un  dormeur  effare. 

Apres  les  oiseaux,.  les  ames  ! 
Volez  sous  les  cieux  blafards. 
L'etang,  miroir,  rit  aux  femmes 
Qui  sortent  des  nenuphars. 

L'air  sanglote,  et  le  vent  rale, 
Et,  sous  I'obscur  firmament, 
La  nuit  sombre  et  la  mort  pale 
Se  regardant  fixement. 


ISO  A  S'lUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

But  the  twenty-fifth  poem  in  this  book  of  lyrics 
has  assuredly  never  been  excelled  since  first  the 
impulse  of  articulate  song  awoke  in  the  first  re- 
corded or  unrecorded  poet. 

Proscrit,  regaide  les  roses; 
Mai  joyeux,  de  I'aube  en  pleurs 
Les  re9oit  toutes  ecloses; 
Present,  regarde  les  fleurs. 

— Je  pense 
Aux  roses  que  je  semai. 
Le  mois  de  mai  sans  la  France, 
Ce  n'est  pas  le  mois  de  mai. 

Proscrit,  regarde  les  tombes; 
Mai,  qui  rit  aux  cieux  si  beaux, 
Sous  les  baisers  des  colombes 
Fait  palpiter  les  tombeaux. 

— Je  pense 
Aux  yeux  chers  que  je  fermai. 
Le  mois  de  mai  sans  la  France. 
Ce  n'est  pas  le  mois  de  mai. 

Proscrit,  regarde  les  branches, 
Les  branches  ou  sont  les  nids; 
Mai  les  remplit  d'ailes  blanches 
Et  de  soupirs  infinis. 

— Je  pense 

Aux  nids  charmants  oil  j'aimai. 

Le  mois  de  mai  sans  la  France, 

Ce  n'est  pas  le  mois  de  mai. 
Mai  1854. 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  131 

In  October  of  the  same  year — the  second  year 
of  his  long  exile — a  loftier  note  of  no  less  heav- 
enly melody  was  sounded  by  the  lyric  poet  who 
alone  of  all  his  nation  has  taken  his  place  beside 
Coleridge  and  Shelley.  The  word  "  passant,"  as 
addressed  by  the  soul  to  the  body,  is  perhaps  the 
very  finest  expression  of  his  fervent  faith  in  im- 
mortality to  be  found  in  all  the  work  of  Victor 
Hugo. 

II  est  un  peu  tard  pour  faire  la  belle, 
Reine  marguerite;  aux  champs  defleuris 
Bieniot  vont  souffler  le  givre  et  la  grele. 
— Passant,  I'hiver  vient,  etje  lui  souris. 

II  est  un  peu  tard  pour  faire  la  belle, 
Etoile  du  soir;  les  rayons  taris 
Sont  tous  reiournes  a  I'aube  eternelle. 
— Passant,  la  nuit  vient,  et  je  lui  souris. 

II  est  un  peu  tard  pour  faire  la  belle, 
Mon  ame;  joyeuse  en  mes  noirs  debris, 
Tu  m  eblouis,  fiere  et  rouvrant  ton  alie. 
— Passint,  la  mort  vient,  et  je  lui  souris. 

No  date  is  affixed  to  the  divine  song  of  yearn- 
ing after  home  and  the  graves  which  make  holier 
for  every  man  old  enough  to  have  been  a  mourner 
the  native  land  which  holds  them.  The  play  on 
sound  which  distinguishes  the  last  repetition   of 


132  A  STUDK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

the  burden  is  the  crowning  evidence  that  the  sub- 
tlest effect  of  pathos  and  the  most  austere  effect 
of  subhmity  may  be  conveyed  through  a  trick  of 
language  familiar  in  their  highest  and  most  se- 
rious moods  to  ^schylus  and  to  Shakespeare. 

EXIL. 

Si  je  pouvais  voir,  6  patrie, 

Tes  amandiers  et  tes  lilas, 

Et  fouler  ton  herbe  fleurie, 

Helas  ! 

Si  je  pouvais, — mais,  6  mon  pere, 
O  ma  mere,  je  ne  peux  pas, — 
Prendre  pour  chevet  votre  pierre, 
Helas  ! 

Dans  le  froid  cercueil  qui  vous  gene, 
Si  je  pouvais  vous  parler  bas, 
Mon  frere  Abel,  mon  frere  Eugene, 
Helas  ! 

Si  je  pouvais,  6  ma  colombe, 
Et  toi,  mere,  qui  t'envolas, 
M'agenouiller  sur  votre  tombe, 
Helas  ! 

Oh  !  vers  I'etoile  solitaire, 
Comme  je  leveraisles  bras  ! 
Commc  je  baiserais  la  terre, 
Helas ! 

Loin  de  vous,  6  morts  que  je  pleure, 
Des  Hots  noirs  j  ecoute  le  glas; 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.         133 

Je  voudrais  fuir,  mais  je  demeure, 
Helas  ! 

Pourtant  le  sort,  cache  dans  Tombre, 
Se  trompe  si,  comptant  mes  pas, 
II  croit  que  le  vieux  marcheur  sombre 
Est  las. 

The  epic  book  is  the  most  tragic  and  terrible 
of  all  existing  poems  of  its  kind;  if  indeed  we 
may  say  that  it  properly  belongs  to  any  kind  ex- 
isting before  its  advent.  The  growing  horror  of 
the  gradual  vision  of  history,  from  Henri  the 
Fourth  to  his  bloody  and  gloomy  son,  from  Louis 
the  Thirteenth  to  the  murderer  and  hangman  of 
the  Palatinate  and  the  Cevennes,  from  Louis  the 
Fourteenth  to  the  inexpressible  pollution  of  in- 
carnate ignominy  in  his  grandson,  seems  to  heave 
and  swell  as  a  sea  towards  the  coming  thunder 
which  was  to  break  above  the  severed  head  of 
their  miserable  son. 

And  next  year  came  Torqiieviada :  one  of  the 
greatest  masterpieces  of  the  master  poet  of  our 
century.  The  construction  of  this  tragedy  is  ab- 
solutely original  and  unique  :  free  and  full  of 
change  as  the  wildest  and  loosest  and  roughest  of 
dramatic  structures  ever  flung  together,  and  left 
to  crumble  or  cohere  at  the   pleasure  of  accident 


134  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

or  of  luck,  by  the  rudest  of  primaeval  playwrights  : 
but  perfect  in  harmonious  unity  of  spirit,  in  sym- 
metry or  symphony  of  part  with  part,  as  the  most 
finished  and  flawless  creation  of  Sophocles  or  of 
Phidias.  Between  some  of  the  characters  in  this 
play  and  some  of  those  in  previous  plays  of  Hugo's 
there  is  a  certain  resemblance  as  of  kinship,  but 
no  touch  or  shadow  of  mere  repetition  or  repro- 
duction from  types  which  had  been  used  before  : 
Ferdinand  the  Catholic  has  something  in  his  linea- 
ments of  Louis  the  Just,  and  Gucho  of  L'Angely 
in  Marion  de  Loi-mc  :  the  Marquis  of  Fuentel  has 
a  touch  of  Gunich  in  Les  deux  trouvailles  de  Gallus, 
redeemed  by  a  better  touch  of  human  tenderness 
for  his  recovered  grandson.  The  young  lovers 
are  two  of  the  loveliest  figures,  Torquemada  is 
one  of  the  sublimest,  in  all  the  illimitable  world 
of  dramatic  imagination.  The  intensity  of  inter- 
est, anxiety,  and  terror,  which  grows  by  such 
rapid  and  subtle  stages  of  development  up  to  the 
thunderstroke  of  royal  decision  at  the  close  of  the 
first  act,  is  exchanged  in  the  second  for  an  even 
deeper  and  higher  kind  of  emotion.  The  con- 
frontation of  the  hermit  with  the  inquisitor,  mag- 
nificent enough  already  in  its  singleness  of  effect, 
is  at  once  transfigured  and  completed  by  the  ap- 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.         135 

parition  of  the  tremendous  figure  whose  very 
name  is  tragedy,  whose  very  shadow  sufficed  for 
the  central  and  the  crowning  terror  which  dar- 
kened the  stage  of  Liicrece  Borgia. 

Le  Chasseur. 

Le  hasard  a  petri  la  cendre  avec  1 'instant; 
Cet  amalgame  est  rhomme.    Or,  moi-meme  n'etant 
Comme  vous  que  matiere,  ah  !  je  serais  stupide 
D'etre  hesitant  et  lourd  quand  la  joie  est  rapide, 
De  ne  point  mordre  en  hate  au  plaisir  dans  la  nuit, 
Et  de  ne  pas  gouter  a  tout,  puisque  tout  fuit  ! 
Avant  tout,  etre  heureux.     Je  prends  a  mon  service 
Ce  qu'on  appelle  crime  et  ce  qu'on  nomme  vice. 
L'inceste,  prejuge.     Le  meurtre,  expedient. 
J'honore  le  scrupule  en  le  congediant. 
Est-ce  que  vous  croyez  que,  si  ma  fiUe  est  belle, 
Je  me  general,  moi,  pour  etre  amoureux  d'elle  ! 
Ah  9a,  mais  je  serais  un  imbecile.     II  faut 
Que  j'existe.     Allez  done  demander  au  gerfaut, 
A  I'aigle,  a  I'epervier,  si  cette  chair  qu"il  broie 
Est  permise,  et  s'il  sait  de  quel  nid  sort  si  proie. 
Parce  que  vous  portez  un  habit  noir  ou  blanc, 
Vous  vous  croyez  force  d'etre  inepte  et  tremblant, 
Et  vous  baissez  les  yeux  devant  cette  offre  immense 
Du  bonheur,  que  vous  fait  I'univers  en  demence. 
Ayons  done  de  I'esprit.     Profitons  du  temps.     Rien 
Etant  le  resultat  de  la  mort,  vivons  bien  I 
La  salle  de  bal  croule  et  devient  catacombe. 
L'ame  du  sage  arrive  en  dansant  dans  la  tombe. 
Servez-moi  mon  festin.     S'il  exige  aujourd'hui 


136  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

Un  assalsonnement  de  poison  pour  autrui, 

Soit.     Qu'importe  la  mort  des  autres  !     J'ai  la  vie. 

Jc  suis  une  faim,  vaste,  ardente,  inassouvie. 

Mort,  je  veux  t'oublier;  Dieu,  je  veux  t'ignorer. 

Qui,  le  monde  est  pour  moi  le  fruit  a  devorer. 

Vivant,  je  suis  en  hate  heureux;  mort,  je  mechappe! 

FRAN901S  DE  Paule,  a  Torqiiemada. 
Qu'est-ce  que  ce  bandit  ? 

TORQUEMADA. 

Mon  pere,  c'ert  le  pape. 

The  third  act  revives  again  the  more  immedi- 
ate and  personal  interest  of  the  drama.  Terror 
and  pity  never  rose  higher,  never  found  utterance 
more  sublime  and  piercing,  in  any  work  of  any 
poet  in  the  world,  than  here  in  the  scene  of  the 
supplication  of  the  Jews,  and  the  ensuing  scene 
of  the  triumph  of  Torquemada. 

The  Jews  enter;  men,  women,  and  children  all 
covered  with  ashes  and  clothed  in  rags,  barefoot, 
with  ropes  round  their  necks,  some  mutilated  and 
made  infirm  by  torture,  dragging  themselves  on 
crutches  or  on  stumps;  others,  whose  eyes  have 
been  put  out,  are  led  by  children.  And  their 
spokesman  pleads  thus  with  the  king  and  the 
queen  of  the  kingdoms  from  whence  they  are  to 
be  driven  by  Christian  jurisdiction. 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.         137 

Moise-ben-Habib,  grand  rabbin,  agenoux. 

Altesse  de  Castille,  altesse  d'Aragon, 

Roi,  reine  !  6  notre  maitre,  et  vous,  notre  maitresse, 

Nous,  vos  tremblants  sujets,  nous  sommes  en  detresse, 

Et,  pieds  nus,  corde  au  cou,  nous  prions  Dieu  d'abord, 

Et  vous  ensuite,  eiant  dans  I'ombre  de  la  mort, 

Ayant  plusieurs  de  nous  qu'on  va  livrer  aux  flammes, 

Et  tout  le  reste  etant  chasse,  vieillards  et  femmes, 

Et,  sous  I'oeil  qui  voit  tout  du  fond  du  firmament, 

Rois,  nous  vous  apportons  notre  gemissement. 

Altesses,  vos  d^crets  surnous  se  precipitent, 

Nous  pleurons,  et  les  os  de  nos  peres  palpitent; 

Le  sepulcre  pensif  tremble  a  cause  de  vous. 

Ayez  pitie.     Nos  coeurs  sont  fideles  et  doux; 

Nous  vivons  enfermes  dans  nos  maisons  etroites, 

Humbles,  seuls;  nos  lois  sont  tres  simples  et  tres  droites, 

Tellement  qu'un  enfant  les  meitrait  en  ecrit. 

Jamais  le  juif  ne  chante  et  jamais  il  ne  rit. 

Nous  payons  le  tribut,  n'importe  quelles  sommes. 

On  nous  rem ue  a  terre  avec  le  pied;  nous  sommes 

Comme  le  vetement  d'un  homme  assassine, 

Gloire  a  Dieu  !     Mais  faut-il  qu'  avec  le  nouveau-ne, 

Avec  I'enfant  qu'on  tette,  avec  I'enfant  qu'on  sevre, 

Nu,  poussant  devant  lui  son  chien,  son  boeuf,  sachevre, 

Israel  fuie  et  coure  epars  dans  tous  les  sens  ! 

Qu'on  ne  soit  plus  un  peuple  et  qu'on  soil  des  passants  ! 

Rois,  ne  nous  faites  pas  chasser  a  coups  des  piques, 

Et  Dieu  vous  ouvrira  des  portes  magnifiques. 

Ayez  pitie  de  nous.     Nous  sommes  accables. 

Nous  ne  verrons  done  plus  nos  arbres  et  nos  bles  ! 

Les  meres  n'auront  plus  de  lait  dans  leurs  mamelles  ! 


138  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

Les  betes  dans  les  bois  sont  avec  leurs  femelles, 
Les  nids  dorment  heureux  sous  les  branches  blottis, 
On  laisse  en  paix  la  biche  allaiterses  petits, 
Permettez-nous  de  vivre  aussi,  nous,  dans  nos  caves, 
Sous  nos  pauvres  toits,   presque  au  bagne  et  presque 

esclaves, 
Mais  aupies  des  cercueils  de  nos  p^res  !  daignez 
Nous  souffrir  sous  vos  pieds  de  nos  larmes  baignes  ! 
Oh  !  la  dispersion  sur  les  routes  lointaines, 
Quel  deuil  !     Permettez-nous  de  boire  a  nos  Fontaines 
Et  de  vivre  en  nos  champs,  et  vous  prospererez. 
Helas  !  nous  nous  tordons  les  bras,  desesperes  ! 
Epargnez-nous  I'exil,  6  rois,  et  I'agonie 
De  la  solitude  apre,  6ternelle,  infinie  ! 
Laissez-nous  la  patrie  et  laissez-n  )us  le  ciel ! 
Le  pain  sur  qui  Ton  pleure  en  mangeant  est  du  fiel. 
Ne  soyez  pas  le  vent  si  nous  sommes  la  cendre. 
Vici  notre  ran9on,  helas  !  daignez  la  prendre. 
O  rois,  protegez-nous.     Voyez  nos  desespoirs. 
Soyez  sur  nous,  mais  non  comme  des  anges  noirs; 
Soyez  des  anges  bons  et  doux,  car  I'aile  sombre 
Et  I'aile  blanche,  6  rois,  ne  font  pas  la  meme  ombre. 
Revoquez  votre  arret.     Rois,  nous  vous  supplions 
Par  vos  aieux  sacres,  grands  comme  les  lions, 
Par  les  tombeaux  des  rois,  par  les  tombeaux  des  reines, 
Piofonds  et  penetres  de  lumieres  sereines, 
Et  nous  mettons  nos  coeurs,  6  maiires  des  humains, 
Nos  prieres,  nos  deuils  dans  les  petites  mains 
De  votre  infante  Jeanne,  innocente,  et  pareille 
A  la  fraise  des  bois  oia  se  pose  I'abeille. 
Roi,  reine,  ayez  pitie  ! 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.        139 

After  the  sublime  and  inexpressible  pathos  of 
this  appeal  from  age  and  innocence  against  the 
most  execrable  of  all  religions  that  ever  infected 
earth  and  verified  hell,  it  would  have  been  im- 
possible for  any  poet  but  one  to  find  expression 
for  the  passion  of  unselfish  faith  in  that  infernal 
creed  which  should  not  merely  horrify  and  dis- 
gust us.  But  when  Hugo  brings  before  us  the 
figure  of  the  grand  inquisitor  in  contemplation  of 
the  supreme  act  of  faith  accomplished  in  defiance 
of  king  and  queen  to  the  greater  glory  of  God,  for 
the  ultimate  redemption  of  souls  else  condemned 
to  everlasting  torment,  the  rapture  of  the  terrible 
redeemer,  whose  faith  is  in  salvation  by  fire,  is 
rendered  into  words  of  such  magical  and  magnifi- 
cent inspiration  that  the  conscience  of  our  fancy 
is  well  nigh  conquered  and  convinced  and  con- 
verted for  the  moment  as  we  read. 

TORQUEMADA. 

O  fete,  6  gloire,  6  joie  ! 
La  clemence  terrible  et  superbe  flamboie  ! 
Delivrance  a  jamais  1     Damnes,  soyez  absous  I 
Le  bucher  sur  la  terre  eteint  I'enfer  dessous. 
Sois  beni,  toi  par  qui  lame  au  bonheur  remonte, 
Bucher,  gloire  du  feu  dont  I'enfer  est  la  honte, 
Issue  aboutissant  au  radieux  chemin, 
Porte  du  paradis  rouverle  au  genre  humain, 


140  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

Misericorde  ardente  aux  caresses  sans  nombre, 

Mysterieux  rachat  des  esclaves  de  I'ombre, 

Auto-da-fe  !     Pardon,  bonte,  lumiere,  feu, 

Vie  !  eblouissement  de  la  face  de  Dieu  ! 

Oh  !  quel  depart  splendide  et  que  d  ames  sauv6es  1 

Juifs,  mecreants,    pecheurs,  6  mes  cheres  couvees, 

Un  court  tourment  vous  paie  un  bonheur  infini; 

L'homme  n'est  plus  maudit,  I'homme  n'est  plus  banni; 

Le  salut  s'ouvre  au  fond  des  cieux.     L'amour  s'eveille, 

Et  voici  son  triomphe,  et  voici  sa  merveille, 

Quelle  extase  !     entrer  droit  au  ciel  !  ne  pas  languir  1 

Cris  dans  le  hrasier, 
Entendez-vous  Satan  burler  de  les  voir  fuir  ? 
Que  I'etemel  for9at  pleure  en  I'eternel  bouge  ! 
J'ai  pousse  de  mes  poings  1  enorme  porte  rouge. 
Oh  !  comme  il  a  grince  lorsque  je  refermais 
Sur  lui  les  deux  battanls  hideux,  Toujours,  Jamais  1 
Sinisire,  il  estreste,  derriere  le  mur  sombre. 

//  regarde  le  del. 
Oh  !  j'ai  panse  la  plaie  effrayante  de  I'ombre. 
Le  paradis  souffrait;  le  ciel  avait  au  flanc. 
Get  ulcere,  I'enfer  brulant,  I'enfer  sanglant; 
J'ai  pose  sur  1  enfer  la  flamme  bienfaitrice, 
Et  j'en  vois  dans  I'immense  azur  la  cicatrice. 
■    C'etait  ton  coup  de  lance  au  cote,  Jesus-Christ ! 
Hosanna  !  la  blessure  eternelle  guerit. 
Plus  d'enfer.     C'est  fini.     Les  douleurs  sont  taries. 

//  regarde  le  quemadero. 
Rubis  de  la  fournaise  !  6  braises  !  pierreries  ! 
Flambez,  tisons  !  brulez,  charbons  !  feu  souverain, 
Petille  !  luis,  bucher  !  prodigieux  ecrin 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.         141 

DY'tincelles  qui  vont  devenir  des  ^toiles  ! 
Les  ames,  hors  des  corps  comme  hors  de  leurs  voiles, 
S'en  vont,  et  le  bonheur  sort  du  bain  de  tourments  ! 
Splendeur  !  magnificence  ardente  !  flamboiements  ! 
Satan,  mon  ennemi,  qu'en  dis-tu  ? 

En  extase. 

Feu !  lavage 
De  toutes  les  noirceurs  par  la  flamme  sauvage  I 
Transfiguration  supreme  !  acte  de  foi  ! 
Nous  sommes  deux  sous  I'oeil  de  Dieu,  Satan  et  moi. 
Deux    porte-fourches,    lui,   moi.     Deux    maitres   des 

flammes. 
Lui  perdant  les  humains,  moi  secourant  les  ames; 
Tous  deux  bourreuax,  faisant  par  le  meme  moyen 
Lui  I'enfer,  moi  le  ciel,  lui  le  mal,  moi  le  bien; 
II  est  dans  le  cloaque  et  je  suis  dans  le  temple, 
Et  le  noir  tremblement  de  I'ombre  nous  contemple. 

//  se  reiourne  vers  les  supplicies. 

Ah  !  sans  moi,  vous  etiez  perdus,  mes  bien-aimes  1 
La  piscine  de  feu  vous  epure  enflammes. 
Ah  !  vous  me  maudissez  pour  un  instant  qui  passe, 
Enfants  !    mais   tout   a  I'heure,  oui,  vous   me  rendrez 

grace 
Quand  vous  verrez  a  quoi  vous  avez  echappe; 
Car,  ainsi  que  Michel-Archange,  j'ai  frappe; 
Car  les  blancs  seraphins,  penches  au  puits  de  soufFre, 
Raillent  le  monstrueux  avortement  du  gouffre; 
Car  votre  hurlement  de  haine  arrive  au  jour, 
Begaie,  et,  stupefait,  s'acheve  enchant  d'amour  ! 
Oh  !  comme  j'ai  souffert  de  vous  voir  dans  les  chambres 
De  torture,  criant,  pleurant,  tordantvos  membres. 


142  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

Manics  parl'etau  d'airain,  par  le  fer  chaud  ! 
Vous  voi'a  delivres,  partez,  fuyez  la-haut  I 
Entrez  au  paradis  ! 

//  se  penche  et  scmhk  regarJer  sous  ierre. 

Non,  tu  n'auras  plus  d'ames  ! 
//  se  redresse. 

Dieu  nous  donne  I'appui   que  nous   lui  demandames, 
Et  rhomrae  est  hors  du  gouffre.     Allez,  allez,  allez! 
A  travers  Tombre  ardente  et  les  grands  feux  ailes, 
Levanouissement  de  la  fumee  emporte 
La-haut  I'esprit  vivant  sauv6  de  la  chair  morte  ! 
Tout  le  vieux  crime  humain  de  rhomme  est  arrach^; 
L'un  avait  son  erreur,  I'autre  avait  son  peche, 
Faute  ou  vice,  chaque  ame  avait  son  monstre  enelle 
Qui  rungeait  sa  lumiere  ct  qui  mordait  son  aile; 
L'ange  expirait  en  proie  au  demon.     Maintenant 
Toutbrule,  et  le  partage  auguste  et  rayonnant 
Se  fait  devant  Jesus  dans  la  clarte  dts  lombes. 
Dragons,  tombez  en  cendre;  envolvez-vous,  colombes ! 
Vous  que  I'enfer  tenait,  liberte  !  libcrte  ! 
Montez  de  I'ombre  au  jour.     Changez  d'eternitd  ! 

The  last  act  would  indeed  be  too  cruel  for  en- 
durance if  it  were  not  too  beautiful  for  blame. 
But  not  the  inquisition  itself  was  more  inevitably 
inexorable  than  is  the  spiritual  law,  the  unaltera- 
ble and  immitigable  instinct,  of  tragic  poetry  at 
its  highest.  Dante  could  not  redeem  Francesca, 
Shakespeare  could  not  rescue  Cordelia.  To  none 
of  us,  we  must  think,  can  the  children   of  a  great 


THE  WORK  OF  VICTOR  HUGO.  143 

poet's  divine  imagination  seem  dearer  or  more  de- 
serving of  mercy  than  they  seemed  to  their  crea- 
tor: but  when  poetry  demands  their  immolation, 
they  must  die,  that  they  may  Hve  for  ever. 

Once  more,  but  now  for  the  last  time,  the  world 
was  to  receive  yet  another  gift  from  the  living 
hand  of  the  greatest  man  it  had  seen  since  Shake- 
speare. Towards  the  close  of  his  eighty-second 
year  he  bestowed  on  us  the  crowning  volume  of 
his  crowning  work,  the  imperishable  and  inappre- 
ciable Le'gcnde  dcs  Sihics.  And  at  the  age  of 
eighty-three  years,  two  months,  and  twenty-six 
days,  he  entered  into  rest  for  ever,  and  into  glory 
which  can  perish  only  with  the  memory  of  all 
things  memorable  among  all  races  and  nations  of 
mankind. 

I  have  spoken  here — and  no  man  can  know  so 
well  or  feel  so  deeply  as  myself  with  what  imperfec- 
tion of  utterance  and  inadequacy  of  insight  I  have 
spoken — of  Victor  Hugo  as  the  whole  world  knew 
and  as  all  honorable  or  intelligent  men  regarded 
and  revered  him.  But  there  are  those  among  his 
friends  and  mine  who  would  have  a  right  to  won- 
der if  no  word  were  here  to  be  said  of  the  unso- 
licited and  unmerited  kindness  which  first  vouch- 
safed to  take  notice  of  a  crude  and  puerile  attempt 


144  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

to  render  some  tribute  of  thanks  for  the  gifts  of 
his  genius  just  twenty-three  years  ago;  of  the 
kindness  which  was  always  but  too  ready  to  re- 
cognize and  requite  a  gratitude  which  had  no 
claim  on  him  but  that  of  a  very  perfect  loyalty;  of 
the  kindness  which  many  years  afterwards  re- 
ceived me  as  a  guest  under  his  roof  with  the  wel- 
come of  a  father  to  a  son.  Such  matters,  if  touched 
on  at  all,  unquestionably  should  not  be  dwelt  on 
in  public:  but  to  give  them  no  word  whatever  of 
acknowledgment  at  parting  would  show  rather 
unthankfulness  than  reserve  in  one  who  was  hon- 
ored so  far  above  all  possible  hope  or  merit  by 
the  paternal  goodness  of  Victor  Hugo. 


LA  LEGENDE  DES  SIECLES. 

1883. 

"  Chacun  a  sa  maniere.  Quant  S,  moi,  qui  parle  ici,  j'admire 
tout,  comme  une  brute. — N'espcrcz  done  aucune  critique. — ^Je  ne 
chicane  point  ces  grands  bienfaiteurs-1^.  Ce  que  vous  qualifiez 
defaut,  je  le  qualifie  accent.  Je  re9ois  et  je  remercie.- — Ayant  eu 
I'honneur  d'etre  appele  "niais"  par  plusieurs  ecrivains  et 
critiques  distingues,  je  cherche  a  justifier  I'epithete." 

The  greatest  work  of  the  century  is  now  at 
length  complete.  It  is  upwards  of  twenty-four 
years  since  the  first  part  of  it  was  sent  home  to 
France  from  Guernsey.  Eighteen  years  later  we 
received  a  second  instalment  of  the  yet  unex- 
hausted treasure.  And  here,  at  the  age  of  eighty- 
one,  the  sovereign  poet  of  the  world  has  placed 
the  copingstone  on  the  stateliest  of  spiritual 
buildings  that  ever  in  modern  times  has  been 
reared  for  the  wonder  and  the  worship  of  man- 
kind. 

Those  only  to  whom  nothing  seems  difficult  be- 
cause nothimj  to  them  seems  greater  than   them- 


146  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

selves  could  find  it  other  than  an  arduous  under- 
taking to  utter  some  word  of  not  unworthy  wel- 
come and  thanksgiving  when  their  life  is  suddenly- 
enriched  and  brightened  by  such  an  addition  to 
its  most  precious  things  as  the  dawn  of  a  whole 
new  world  of  song — and  a  world  that  may  hold 
its  own  in  heaven  beside  the  suns  created  or 
jvoked  by  the  fiat  of  Shakespeare  or  of  Dante. 
To  review  the  Dhnne  Comedy,  to  dispose  oi  Ham- 
let in  the  course  of  a  leading  article,  to  despatch 
in  a  few  sentences  the  question  of  Paradise  Lost 
and  its  claim  to  immortality,  might  seem  easy  to 
judges  who  should  feel  themselves  on  a  level 
with  the  givers  of  these  gifts;  for  others  it  could 
be  none  the  less  difficult  to  discharge  this  office 
because  the  gift  was  but  newly  given.  One  minor 
phase  of  the  difficulty  which  presents  itself  is  this: 
the  temporary  judge,  self-elected  to  pass  sentence 
on  any  supreme  achievement  of  human  power, 
must  choose  on  which  horn  of  an  inevitable  dilem- 
ma he  may  prefer  to  run  the  risk  of  impalement.  If, 
recognizing  in  this  new  master-work  an  equal 
share  of  the  highest  qualities  possible  to  man 
with  that  possessed  and  manifested  by  any  pre- 
vious writer  of  now  unquestioned  supremacy,  he 
takes  upon  himself  to  admit,  simply  and  honestly, 


LA  LEGEND E  DES  SIECLES.  147 

that  he  does  recognize  this,  and  cannot  choose 
but  recognize  it,  he  must  know  that  his  judgment 
will  be  received  with  no  more  tolerance  or  respect, 
with  no  less  irritation  and  derision,  than  would 
have  been,  in  Dante's  time,  the  judgment  of  a  critic 
who  should  have  ventured  to  rank  Dante  above 
Virgil,  in  Shakespeare's  time  of  a  critic  who  should 
have  dared  to  set  Shakespeare  beside  Homer.  If, 
on  the  other  hand,  he  should  abstain  with  all  due 
discretion  from  any  utterance  or  any  intimation  of 
a  truth  so  ridiculous  and  untimely,  he  runs  the 
sure  and  certain  risk  of  leaving  behind  him  a 
name  to  be  ranked,  by  all  who  remember  it  at  all, 
with  those  which  no  man  mentions  without  a 
smile  of  compassion  or  of  scorn,  according  to  the 
quality  of  error  discernible  in  the  critic's  mis- 
judgment:  innocent  and  incurable  as  the  confi- 
dence of  a  Johnson  or  a  Jeffrey,  venomous  and 
malignant  as  the  rancor  of  Sainte-Beuve  or  Gif- 
ford.  Of  these  two  dangers  I  choose  the  former; 
and  venture  to  admit,  in  each  case  with  equal  dif- 
fidence, that  I  do  upon  the  whole  prefer  Dante  to 
any  Cino  or  Cecco,  Shakespeare  to  all  the  Greenes 
and  Peeles  and  Lillys,  Victor  Hugo  to  all  or  any, 
of  their  respective  times.  The  reader  who  has  no 
tolerance  for  paradox  or  presumption  has  there- 
fore fair  warning  to  read  no  further. 


148  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

Auguste  Vacquerie,  of  all  poets  and  all  men 
living  the  most  worthy  to  praise  the  greatest  poet 
of  his  century,  has  put  on  record  long  ago,  with 
all  the  vivid  ardor  of  his  admirable  style,  an  ex- 
perience of  which  I  now  am  but  too  forcibly  re- 
minded. He  was  once  invited  by  Victor  Hugo 
to  choose  among  the  manuscripts  of  the  master's 
unpublished  work,  from  the  drawers  containing 
respectively  some  lyric  or  dramatic  or  narrative 
masterpiece,  of  which  among  the  three  kinds  he 
would  prefer  to  have  a  sample  first.  Unable  to 
select,  he  touched  a  drawer  at  random,  which  con- 
tained the  opening  chapters  of  a  yet  unfinished 
story — Lcs  Aliserablcs.  If  it  is  no  less  hard  to 
choose  where  to  begin  in  a  notice  of  the  Legende 
des  Sicclcs — to  decide  what  star  in  all  this  thronged 
and  living  heaven  should  first  attract  the  direc- 
tion of  our  critical  telescope — it  is  on  the  other 
hand  no  less  certain  that  on  no  side  can  the  tele- 
scope be  misdirected.  From  the  miraculous  music 
of  a  legendary  dawn,  when  the  first  woman  felt 
first  within  her  the  movement  of  her  first-born 
child,  to  the  crowning  vision  of  ultimate  justice 
made  visible  and  material  in  the  likeness  of  the 
trumpet  of  doom,  no  radiance  or  shadow  of  days 
or  nights  intervening,  no  change  of  light  or  ca- 


LA  LEG  END  E  DES  SLECLES.  149 

dence  cf  music  in  all  the  tragic  pageant  of  the 
centuries,  finds  less  perfect  expression  and  re- 
sponse, less  absolute  refraction  or  reflection,  than 
all  that  come  and  go  before  or  after  it.  History 
and  legend,  fact  and  vision,  are  fused  and  harmon- 
ized by  the  mastering  charm  of  moral  unity  in 
imaginative  truth.  There  is  no  more  possibility 
of  discord  or  default  in  this  transcendent  work  of 
human  power  than  in  the  working  of  those  pow- 
ers of  nature  which  transcend  humanity.  In  the 
first  verses  of  the  overture  we  hear  such  depth  and 
height  of  music,  see  such  breadth  and  splendor  of 
beauty,  that  we  know  at  once  these  cannot  but 
continue  to  the  end  ;  and  from  the  end,  when  we 
arrive  at  the  goal  of  the  last  line,  we  look  back 
and  perceive  that  it  has  been  so.  Were  this  over- 
ture but  a  thought  less  perfect,  a  shade  less  tri- 
umphant, we  might  doubt  if  what  was  to  follow 
it  could  be  as  perfect  and  triumphant  as  itself. 
We  might  begin — and  indeed,  as  it  is,  there  are 
naturally  those  who  have  begun — to  debate  with 
ourselves  or  to  dispute  with  the  poet  as  to  the 
details  of  his  scheme,  the  selection  of  his  types, 
the  propriety  of  his  method,  the  accuracy  of  his 
title.  There  are  those  who  would  seem  to  infer 
from  the  choice  of  this  title  that  the  book  is,  in 


1 50  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

the  most  vulgar  sense,  of  a  purely  legendary  cast; 
who  object,  for  example,  that  a  record  of  unself- 
ish and  devoted  charity  shown  by  the  poor  to  the 
poor  is,  happily,  no  "  legend."  Writers  in  whom 
such  self-exposure  of  naked  and  unashamed  ignor- 
ance with  respect  to  the  rudiments  of  language 
is  hardly  to  be  feared  have  apparently  been  in- 
duced or  inclined  to  expect  some  elaborate  and 
orderly  review  of  history,  some  versified  chronicle 
of  celebrated  events  and  significant  epochs,  such 
as  might  perhaps  be  of  subsidiary  or  supplement- 
ary service  in  the  training  of  candidates  for  a 
competitive  examination  ;  and  on  finding  some- 
thing very  different  from  this  have  tossed  head 
and  shrugged  shoulder  in  somewhat  mistimed  im- 
patience, as  at  some  deception  or  misnomer  on 
the  great  author's  part  which  they,  as  men  of 
culture  and  understanding,  had  a  reasonable  right 
to  resent.  The  book,  they  affirm,  is  a  mere  ag- 
glomeration of  unconnected  episodes,  irrelevant 
and  incoherent,  disproportionate  and  fortuitous, 
chosen  at  random  by  accident  or  caprice;  it  is  not 
one  great  palace  of  poetry,  but  a  series  or  conge- 
ries rather  of  magnificently  accumulated  frag- 
ments. It  may  be  urged  in  answer  to  this  im- 
peachment that  the  unity  of  the  book  is  not  logic- 


LA  LEGENDE  DES  SIECLES.  151 

al  but  spiritual  ;  its  diversity  is  not  accidental  or 
chaotic,  it  is  the  result  and  expression  of  a  spon- 
taneous and  perfect  harmony,  as  clear  and  as 
profound  as  that  of  the  other  greatest  works 
achieved  by  man.  To  demonstrate  this  by  rule 
and  line  of  syllogism  is  no  present  ambition  of 
mine.  A  humbler,  a  safer,  and  perhaps  a  more 
profitable  task  would  be  to  attempt  some  flying 
summary,  some  glancing  revision  of  the  three 
great  parts  which  compose  this  mightiest  poem 
of  our  age;  or  rather,  if  this  also  should  seem  too 
presumptuous  an  aspiration,  to  indicate  here  and 
there  the  points  to  which  memory  and  imagina- 
tion are  most  fain  to  revert  most  frequently  and 
brood  upon  them  longest,  with  a  deeper  delight, 
a  more  rapturous  reverence,  than  waits  upon  the 
rest.  Not  that  I  would  venture  to  assert  or  to 
insinuate  that  there  is  in  any  poem  of  the  cycle 
any  note  whatever  of  inferiority  or  disparity;  but 
having  neither  space  nor  time  nor  power  to 
speak,  however  inadequately,  of  each  among  the 
hundred  and  thirty-eight  poems  which  compose 
the  now  perfect  book,  I  am  compelled  to  choose, 
not  quite  at  random,  an  example  here  and  there 
of  its  highest  and  most  typical  qualities.  In  the 
first  book,  for  instance,  of  the  first  series,  the  di- 


152  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

vine  poem  on  Ruth  and  Boaz  may  properly  be 
taken  as  representative  of  that  almost  indefinable 
quality  which  hitherto  has  seemed  more  especially 
the  gift  of  Dante:  a  fusion,  so  to  speak,  of  sub- 
limity with  sweetness,  the  exaltation  of  loveli- 
ness into  splendor  and  simplicity  into  mystery, 
such  as  glorifies  the  close  of  his  Purgatory  and 
the  opening  of  his  Paradise.  Again,  the  majestic 
verses  which  bring  Mahomet  before  us  at  his  end 
strike  a  deeper  impression  into  the  memory  than 
is  left  by  the  previous  poem  on  the  raising  of 
Lazarus  ;  and  when  we  pass  into  the  cycle  of 
heroic  or  chivalrous  legend  we  find  those  poems 
the  loftiest  and  the  loveliest  which  have  in  them 
most  of  that  prophetic  and  passionate  morality 
which  makes  the  greatest  poet,  in  this  as  in  some 
other  ages,  as  much  a  seer  as  a  singer,  an  evan- 
gelist no  less  than  an  artist.  Hugo,  for  all  his 
dramatic  and  narrative  mastery  of  effect,  will  al  ■ 
ways  probably  remind  men  rather  of  such  poets 
as  Dante  or  Isaiah  than  of  such  poets  as  Sopho- 
cles or  Shakespeare.  We  cannot  of  course  im- 
agine the  Florentine  or  the  Hebrew  endowed 
with  his  infinite  variety  of  sympathies,  of  interests, 
and  of  powers;  but  as  little  can  we  imagine  in  the 
Athenian  such  height  and   depth  of  passion,  in 


LA  LEGENDS  DES  SIECLES  153 

the  Englishman  such  unquenchable  and  sleepless 
fire  of  moral  and  prophetic  faith.  And  hardly  in 
any  one  of  these,  though  Shakespeare  may  per- 
haps be  excepted,  can  we  recognize  the  same 
buoyant  and  childlike  exultation  in  such  things 
as  are  the  delight  of  a  high-hearted  child — in  free 
glory  of  adventure  and  ideal  daring,  in  the  tri- 
umph and  rapture  of  reinless  imagination,  which 
gives  now  and  then  some  excess  of  godlike  em- 
pire and  superhuman  kingship  to  their  hands 
whom  his  hands  have  created,  to  the  lips  whose 
life  is  breathed  into  them  from  his  own.  By  the 
Homeric  stature  of  the  soul  he  measures  the  heroic 
capacity  of  the  sword.  And  indeed  it  is  hardly  in 
our  century  that  men  who  do  not  wish  to  provoke 
laughter  should  venture  to  mock  at  a  poet  who 
puts  a  horde  to  flight  before  a  hero,  or  strikes 
down  strongholds  by  the  lightning  of-a  single  will. 
No  right  and  no  power  to  disbelieve  in  the  arm  of 
Hercules  or  the  voice  of  Jesus  can  rationally  re- 
main with  those  who  have  seen  Garibaldi  take  a 
kingdom  into  the  hollow  of  his  hand,  and  not  one 
man  but  a  whole  nation  arise  from  the  dead  at  the 
sound  of  the  word  of  Mazzini. 

Two  out  of  the  five  heroic  poems  which  com- 
pose the  fourth  book  of  the  first  series  will  always 


154  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

remain  types  of  what  the  genius  of  Hugo  could 
achieve  in  two  opposite  Hnes.  All  the  music  of 
morning,  all  the  sunshine  of  romance,  all  the 
sweetness  and  charm  of  chivalry,  will  come  back 
upon  all  readers  at  the  gracious  and  radiant  name 
of  Ayvicrillot;  all  the  blackness  of  darkness  rank 
with  fumes  of  blood  and  loud  with  cries  of  tor- 
ment, which  covers  in  so  many  quarters  the  his- 
tory, not  romantic  but  actual,  of  the  ages  called 
ages  of  faith,  will  close  in  upon  the  memory  which 
reverts  to  the  direful  Day  of  Kings.  The  sound 
of  the  final  note  struck  in  the  latter  poem  remains 
in  the  mind  as  the  echo  of  a  crowning  peal  of 
thunder  in  the  ear  of  one  entranced  and  spell- 
stricken  by  the  magnetism  of  storm.  The  Pyre- 
nees belong  to  Hugo  as  the  western  coasts  of 
Italy,  Neapolitan  or  Tuscan,  belong  to  Shelley; 
they  can  never  again  be  done  into  words  and 
translated  into  music  as  for  once  they  have  been 
by  these.  It  can  hardly  be  said  that  he  who 
knows  the  Pyrenees  has  read  Victor  Hugo;  but 
certainly  it  may  be  said  that  he  who  knows  Vic- 
tor Hugo  has  seen  the  Pyrenees.  From  the  au- 
thor's prefatory  avowal  that  his  book  contains 
few  bright  or  smiling  pictures,  a  reader  would 
never  have  inferred  that  so  many  of  its  pages  are 


LA  LEGEJSDE  DBS  SIECLES.  155 

fragrant  with  all  the  breath  and  radiant  with  all 
the  bloom  of  April  or  May  among  the  pine-woods 
and  their  mountain  lawns,  ablaze  with  ardent 
blossom  and  astir  with  triumphant  song.  Tragedy 
may  be  hard  at  hand,  with  all  the  human  train  of 
sorrows  and  passions  and  sins;  but  the  glory  of 
beauty,  the  loveliness  of  love,  the  exultation  of 
noble  duty  and  lofty  labor  in  a  stress  of  arduous 
joy,  these  are  the  influences  that  pervade  the 
world  and  permeate  the  air  of  the  poems  which 
deal  with  the  Christian  cycle  of  heroic  legend, 
whose  crowning  image  is  the  ideal  figure  of  the 
Cid.  To  this  highest  and  purest  type  of  mediaeval 
romance  or  history  the  fancy  of  the  great  poet 
whose  childhood  was  cradled  in  Spain  turns  and 
returns  throughout  the  course  of  his  threefold 
masterpiece  with  an  almost  national  pride  and 
passion  of  sublime  delight.  Once  in  the  first  part 
and  once  in  the  third  his  chosen  hero  is  set  be- 
fore us  in  heroic  verse,  doing  menial  service  for 
his  father  in  his  father's  house,  and  again,  in  a 
king's  palace,  doing  for  humanity  the  sovereign 
service  of  tyrannicide.  But  in  the  second  part  it 
seems  as  though  the  poet  could  hardly,  with  his 
fullest  effusion  of  lyric  strength  and  sweetness,  do 
enough  to  satisfy  his  loving  imagination  of  the 


156  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

perfect  knight,  most  faithful  and  most  gentle  and 
most  terrible,  whom  he  likens  even  to  the  very 
Pic  du  Midi  in  its  majesty  of  solitude.  Each  fresh 
blast  of  verse  has  in  it  the  ring  of  a  golden  clar- 
ion which  proclaims  in  one  breath  the  honor  of 
the  loyal  soldier  and  the  dishonor  of  the  disloyal 
king.  There  can  hardly  be  in  any  language  a 
more  precious  and  wonderful  study  of  technical 
art  in  verse  of  the  highest  kind  of  simplicity  than 
this  Rotnancero  dii  Cid,  with  its  jet  of  luminous 
and  burning  song  sustained  without  lapse  or  break 
through  sixteen  "  fyttes "  of  plain  brief  ballad 
metre.  It  is  hard  to  say  whether  the  one  only 
master  of  all  forms  and  kinds  of  poetry  that  ever 
left  to  all  time  the  proof  of  his  supremacy  in  all 
has  shown  most  clearly  by  his  use  of  its  highest 
or  his  use  of  its  simplest  forms  the  innate  and 
absolute  equality  of  the  French  language  as  an  in- 
strument for  poetry  with  the  Greek  of  yEschylus 
and  of  Sappho,  the  English  of  Milton  and  of 
Shelley. 

But  among  all  Hugo's  romantic  and  tragic 
poems  of  mediaeval  history  or  legend  the  two 
greatest  are  in  my  mind  Eviradmis  and  Ratbert. 
I  cannot  think  it  would  be  rash  to  assert  that  the 
loveliest  love-song  in  the  world,  the  purest  and 


LA  LEG  END  E  DLS  SIECLES.  157 

keenest  rapture  of  lyric  fancy,  the  sweetest  and 

clearest  note  of  dancing  or  dreaming  music,  is  that 

which    rings    forever  in   the  ear  which  has  once 

caught  the  matchless  echo  of  such  lines  as  these 

that  must  once  more  be  quoted,  as  though  all  the 

world  of  readers  had  not  long  since  known  them 

by  heart: — 

Viens,  sois  tendre,  je  suis  ivre. 
O  les  verts  taillis  mouilles  ! 
Ton  souffle  te  fera  suivre 
Des  papillons  reveilles. 


Allons-nous-en  par  I'Autriche  ! 
Nous  aurons  I'aube  a  nos  fronts; 
Je  serai  grand,  et  toi  riche, 
Puisque  nous  nous  aimerons. 


Tu  seras  dame,  et  moi  comte; 
Viens,  men  cceur  s'epanouit, 
Viens,  nous  conterons  ce  conte 
Aux  etoiles  de  la  nuit. 

The  poet  would  be  as  sure  of  a  heavenly  immor- 
tality in  the  hearts  of  men  as  any  lyrist  of  Greece 
itself,  who  should  only  have  written  the  fourteen 
stanzas  of  the  song  from  which  I  have  ventured 
to  choose  these  three.  All  the  sounds  and  shad- 
ows of  a   moonlit    wilderness,    all  the  dews  and 


158  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

murmurs  and  breaths  of  midsummer  midnight, 
have  become  for  once  articulate  in  such  music  as 
was  never  known  even  to  Shakespeare's  forest  of 
Arden.  In  the  heart  of  a  poem  so  full  of  tragedy 
and  terror  that  Hugo  alone  could  have  brightened 
it  with  his  final  touch  of  sunrise,  this  birdlike  rap- 
ture breaks  out  as  by  some  divine  effect  of  unfor- 
bidden and  blameless  magic. 

And  yet,  it  may  be  said  or  thought,  the  master 
of  masters  has  shown  himself  even  greater  in  Rat- 
bcrt  than  in  Eviradmts.  This  most  tragic  of 
poems,  lit  up  by  no  such  lyric  interlude,  stands 
unsurpassed  even  by  its  author  for  tenderness, 
passion,  divine  magnificence  of  righteous  rath, 
august  and  pitiless  command  of  terror  and  pity. 
From  the  kingly  and  priestly  conclave  of  debaters 
more  dark  than  Milton's  to  the  superb  admoni- 
tion of  loyal  liberty  in  speech  that  can  only  be 
silenced  by  murder,  and  again  from  the  heavenly 
and  heroic  picture  of  childhood  worshipped  by  old 
age  to  the  monstrous  banquet  of  massacre,  when 
the  son  of  the  prostitute  has  struck  his  perjured 
stroke  of  state,  the  poem  passes  through  a  change 
of  successive  pageants  each  fuller  of  splendor  and 
wonder,  of  loveliness  or  of  horror,  than  the  last, 
but  the  agony  of  the  hero  over  the  little  corpse 


LA  LEGENDE  DES  SIECLES.  159 

of  the  child  murdered  with  her  plaything  in  her 
hand — the  anguish  that  utters  itself  as  in  peal 
upon  peal  of  thunder,  broken  by  sobs  of  storm — 
the  full  crash  of  the  final  imprecation,  succeeded 
again  by  such  unspeakably  sweet  and  piteous  ap- 
peal to  the  little  dead  lips  and  eyes  that  would 
have  answered  yesterday — and  at  last  the  one 
crowning  stroke  of  crime  which  calls  down  an 
answering  stroke  of  judgment  from  the  very  height 
of  heaven,  for  the  comfort  and  refreshment  and 
revival  of  all  hearts — these  are  things  of  which 
no  praise  can  speak  aright.  Shakespeare  only, 
were  he  living,  would  be  worthy  to  write  on 
Hugo's  Fabrice  as  Hugo  has  written  on  Shake- 
speare's Lear.  History  will  forget  the  name  of 
Bonaparte  before  humanity  forgets  the  name  of 
Ratbert. 

But  if  this  be  the  highest  poem  of  all  for  pas- 
sion and  pathos  and  fire  of  terrible  emotion,  the 
highest  in  sheer  sublimity  of  imagination  is  to  my 
mind  Zim-Zizinii.  Again  and  again,  in  reading 
it  for  the  first  time,  one  thinks  that  surely  now 
the  utmost  height  is  reached,  the  utmost  faculty 
revealed,  that  can  be  possible  for  a  spirit  clothed 
only  with  human  powers,  armed  only  with  human 
speech.     And  always  one  finds  the  next  step  for- 


i6o  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

ward  to  be  yet  once  more  a  step  upward,  even  to 
the  very  end  and  limit  of  them  all.  Neither  in 
Homer  nor  in  Milton,  nor  in  the  English  version 
of  Job  or  Ezekiel  or  Isaiah,  is  the  sound  of  the 
roll  and  the  surge  of  measured  music  more  won- 
derful than  here.  Even  after  the  vision  of  the 
tomb  of  Belus  the  miraculous  impression  of  splen- 
dor and  terror,  distinct  in  married  mystery,  and 
diverse  in  unity  of  warning,  deepens  and  swells 
onward  like  a  sea  till  we  reach  the  incomparable 
psalm  in  praise  of  the  beauty  and  the  magic  of 
womanhood  made  perfect  and  made  awful  in  Cleo- 
patra, which  closes  in  horror  at  the  touch  of  a 
hand  more  powerful  than  Orcagna's.  The  walls 
of  the  Campo  Santo  are  fainter  preachers  and  fee- 
bler pursuivants  of  the  triumph  of  death  than  the 
pages  of  the  poem  which  yet  again  renews  its 
note  of  menace  after  menace  and  prophecy  upon 
prophecy  till  the  end.  There  is  probably  not  one 
single  couplet  in  all  this  sweet  and  bitter  roll  of 
song  which  could  have  been  written  by  any  poet 
less  than  the  best  or  lower  than  the  greatest  of 
all  time. 

Passants,  quelqu'un  veut-il  voir  Cleopatre  au  lit  ? 
Venez;  lalcove  est  morne,  une  brume  I'emplit; 
Cleopatre  est  couchee  a  jamais;  cette  femme 


LA  LEGEND E  DES  SIECLES.  i6i 

Fut  1  eblouissement  de  I'Asie,  et  la  flamme 

Que  tout  le  genre  humain  avait  dans  son  regard; 

Quand  elle  disparut,  le  monde  fut  hagard; 

Ses  dents  etaient  de  perle  et  sa  bouche  etait  d'ambre; 

Les  rois  mouraient  d'amour  en  etrant  dans  sa  chambre; 

Pour  elle  Ephractaeus  soumit  I'Atlas,  Sapor 

Vint  d'Ozymandias  saisir  les  cercle  d'or, 

Mamylos  conquit  Suse  et  Tentyris  detruite 

Et  Palmyre,  et  pour  elle  Antoine  prit  la  fuite; 

Entre  elle  et  I'univers  qui  s'offraient  a  la  fois 

II  hesita,  lachant  le  monde  dans  son  choix. 

Cleopatre  egalait  les  Junons  eternelles; 

Une  chaine  sortait  de  ses  vagues  prunelles; 

O  tremblant  coeur  humain,  si  jamais  tu  vibras, 

C'est  dans  I'etreinte  altiere  et  douce  de  ses  bras; 

Son  nom  seul  enivrait;  Strophus  n'osait  I'ecrire; 

La  terre  s'eclairait  de  son  divin  sourire, 

A  force  de  lumiere  et  d'amour,  effrayant; 

Sons  corps  semblait  meled'azur;  en  la  voyant, 

Venus,  le  soir,  rentrait  jalouse  sous  la  nue; 

Cleopatre  embaumait  I'Egj-pte;  toute  nue, 

Elle  brulait  les  yeux  ainsi  que  le  soleil; 

Les  roses  enviaient  I'ongle  de  son  orteil; 

O  vivants,  allez  voir  sa  tombe  souveraine; 

Fiere,  elle  6tait  deesse  et  daignait  etre  reine; 

L'amour  prenait  pour  arc  sa  levre  aux  coins  moqueurs; 

Sa  beaute  rendait  fous  les  fronts,  les  sens,  les  coeurs, 

Et  plus  que  les  lions  rugissants  dtait  forte; 

Mais  bouchez-vous  le  nez  si  vous  passez  la  porte. 

At  every  successive  stage  of  his  task,  the  man 
who  undertakes  to  glance  over  this  great  cycle  of 


1 62  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

poems  must  needs  incessantly  call  to  mind  the 
most  worn  and  hackneyed  of  all  quotations  from 
its  author's  works — "  J'en  passe,  et  des  meilleurs." 
There  is  here  no  room,  as  surely  there  should  no- 
where now  be  any  need,  to  speak  at  any  length  of 
the  poems  in  which  Roland  plays  the  part  of  pro- 
tagonist; first  as  the  beardless  champion  of  a  five 
days'  fight,  and  again  as  the  deliverer  whose  hand 
could  clear  the  world  of  a  hundred  human  wolves 
in  one  continuous  sword-sweep.  There  is  hardly 
time  allowed  us  for  one  poor  word  or  two  of 
tribute  to  such  a  crowning  flower  of  song  as  La 
Rose  de  L Infante,  with  its  parable  of  the  broken 
Armada  made  manifest  in  a  wrecked  fleet  of 
drifting  petals;  to  the  superb  and  sonorous  chant 
of  the  buccaneers,  in  which  all  the  noise  of  law- 
less battle  and  stormy  laughter  passes  off  into  the 
carol  of  mere  triumphant  love  and  trust;  or  even 
to  the  whole  inner  cycle  of  mystic  and  primaeval 
legend  which  seeks  utterance  for  the  human  sense 
of  oppression  or  neglect  by  jealous  or  by  joyous 
gods;  for  the  wild  profound  revolt  of  riotous  and 
trampled  nature,  the  agony  and  passion  and  tri- 
umph of  invincible  humanity,  the  protest  and 
witness  of  enduring  earth  against  the  passing 
shades    of  heaven,  the  struggle  and  the  plea  of 


LA  LEGEND E  DES  SIECLES.  163 

eternal  manhood  against  all  transient  forces  of 
ephemeral  and  tyrannous  godhead.  Within  the 
orbit  of  this  epicycle  one  poem  only  of  the  first 
part,  a  star  of  strife  and  struggle,  can  properly  be 
said  to  revolve;  but  the  light  of  that  planet  has 
fire  enough  to  animate  with  its  reflex  the  whole 
concourse  of  stormy  stars  which  illuminate  the 
world-wide  wrestle  of  the  giants  with  the  gods. 
The  torch  of  revolt  borne  by  the  transfigured 
satyr,  eyed  like  a  god  and  footed  like  a  beast, 
kindles  the  lamp  of  hopeful  and  laborious  rebellion 
which  dazzles  us  in  the  eye  of  the  Titan  who  has 
seen  beyond  the  world.  In  the  song  that  struck 
silence  through  the  triumph  of  amazed  Olympus 
there  is  a  sound  and  air  as  of  the  sea  or  the  Book 
of  Job.  There  may  be  something  of  Persian  or 
Indian  mysticism,  there  is  more  of  universal  and 
imaginative  reason,  in  the  great  allegoric  myth 
which  sets  forth  here  how  the  half-brute  child  of 
one  poor  planet  has  in  him  the  seed,  the  atom,  the 
principle  of  life  everlasting,  and  dilates  in  force  of 
it  to  the  very  type  and  likeness  of  the  eternal  uni- 
versal substance  which  is  spirit  or  matter  of  life; 
and  before  the  face  of  his  transfiguration  the  om- 
nipresent and  omnipotent  gods  who  take  each 
their  turn  to  shine  and  thunder  are  all  but  shad- 


i64  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

ows  that  pass  away.  Since  the  Lord  answered  Job 
out  of  the  whirlwind  no  ear  has  heard  the  burst  of 
such  a  song;  but  this  time  it  is  the  world  that  an- 
swers out  of  its  darkness  the  lords  and  gods  of  creed 
and  oracle,  who  have  mastered  and  have  not  made 
it.  And  in  the  cry  of  its  protest  and  the  prophecy 
of  its  advance  there  is  a  storm  of  swelling  music 
which  is  as  the  sound  of  the  strength  of  rollers 
after  the  noise  of  the  rage  of  breakers. 

It  is  noticeable  that  the  master  of  modern  poets 
should  have  in  the  tone  and  color  of  his  genius 
more  even  of  the  Hebrew  than  the  Greek.  In  his 
love  of  light  and  freedom,  reason  and  justice,  he  is 
not  of  Jerusalem,  but  of  Athens;  but  in  the  bent 
of  his  imagination,  in  the  form  and  color  of  his 
dreams,  in  the  scope  and  sweep  of  his  wide- 
winged  spiritual  flight,  he  is  nearer  akin  to  the  great 
insurgent  prophets  of  deliverance  and  restoration 
than  to  any  poet  of  Athens  except  only  their 
kinsman  vEschylus.  It  is  almost  wholly  of  the 
Persian  war,  the  pass  of  Thermopylae,  the  strait 
of  Euripus,  that  he  sings  when  he  sings  of  Hellas. 
All  his  might  of  hand,  all  his  cunning  of  color,  all 
his  measureless  resources  of  sound  and  form  and 
symbol,  are  put  forth  in  the  catalogue  of  nations 
and  warriors  subject  to  Xerxes.    There  is  nothing 


LA  LEGEND E  DES  SIECLES.  165 

in  poetry  so  vast  and  tremendous  of  its  kind  as 
this  pageant  of  immense  and  monstrous  invasion. 
But  indeed  the  choice  of  gigantic  themes,  the 
predominance  of  colossal  effects,  the  prevalence  of 
superhuman  visions  over  the  types  and  figures  of 
human  history  or  legend,  may  be  regarded  as  a 
distinctive  point  of  difference  between  the  second 
and  the  first  series.  A  typical  example  of  the 
second  is  the  poem  which  has  added  an  eighth 
wonder  built  by  music  to  the  seven  wonders  of 
the  world,  which  it  celebrates  in  verse  more  surely 
wrought  for  immortality  than  they.  Another  is 
the  song  of  the  worm  which  takes  up  in  answer  to 
their  chant  of  life  and  light  and  pride  of  place, 
and  prolongs  through  measure  after  measure  of 
rolling  and  reverberating  verse,  the  note  of  a 
funereal  and  universal  triumph,  the  protest  and  the 
proclamation  of  death.  Another,  attuned  to  that 
mighty  music  of  meditation  which  rings  through 
so  many  of  the  poems  written  in  exile  and  loneli- 
ness, is  the  stately  prophetic  hymn  which  bears 
the  superscription  of  All  the  Past  and  all  the 
Future.  This  might  seem  to  belong  to  the  sixth 
book  of  the  Contemplations,  in  which  the  same 
note  of  proud  and  ardent  faith  was  struck  so  often 
with  such  sovereignty  of  hand.  As  much  might  be 


1 66  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

said  of  the  great  "  absymal"  poem  which  closes 
the  second  series  with  a  symphony  of  worlds  and 
spirits.  Other  groups  of  poems,  in  like  manner, 
bear  signs  of  common  or  of  diverse  kinship  to 
former  works  of  a  creator  whose  spirit  has  put  life 
into  so  many  of  the  same  likeness,  yet  with  no 
more  sign  of  repetition  or  weary  monotony  than  is 
traceable  in  the  very  handiwork  of  nature.  The 
book  of  idyls  is  of  one  inspiration  with  the  Chan- 
sons des  Rues  et  des  Bois;  in  both  cases,  as  in  so 
many  of  the  poet's  earlier  lyric  volumes,  his  in- 
comparable fertility  of  speech  and  superb  facility 
of  verse  leave  almost  an  impression  as  of  work 
done  by  way  of  exercise,  as  though  he  were  writ- 
ing to  keep  his  hand  in,  or  to  show  for  a  wager 
with  incredulous  criticism  how  long  he  could  keep 
up  the  golden  ball  of  metre,  carve  arabesques  of 
the  same  pattern,  play  variations  in  the  same 
key.  But  the  Old  Man's  Idyl  which  closes  the 
book  belongs  by  kinship  to  another  work  of  the 
poet's,  more  beloved  and  more  precious  to  the  in- 
most heart,  if  not  more  eminent  for  strength  and 
cunning  of  hand,  than  any  of  these.  In  "the  voice 
of  a  child  a  year  old  "  there  is  the  same  welling 
and  bubbling  melody  which  flows  and  laughs  and 
murmurs  and  glitters  through  the  adorable  verses 


LA  LEGEND E  DES  SLECLES.  167 

of  LArt  cVctre  Grandpere,  making  dim  with  love 
and  delig-ht  the  reader's  or  the  hearer's  eyes.  At 
last  the  language  of  babies  has  found  its  inter- 
preter; and  that,  as  might  have  been  expected,  in 
the  greatest  poet  of  his  age. 

L'enfant  apporte  un  peu  de  ce  del  dent  il  sort; 

II  ignore,  il  arrive;  homme,  tu  le  recueilles. 

//  a  le  tremblevient  des  herbes  et  dcs  feidlles. 

La  jaserie  avant  le  langage  est  la  fleur 

Qui  precede  le  fruit,  moins  beau  qu'elle,  et  meilleur, 

Si  c'est  etre  meilleur  qu'etre  plus  necessaire. 

A  conclusion  which  may  be  doubted  when  we 
consider  as  follows: 

L'enfant  fait  la  demande  et  I'ange  la  reponse; 
Le  babil  pueril  dans  le  ciel  bleu  s'enfonce, 
Puis  s'en  revient,  avec  les  hesitations 
Du  moineau  qui  verrait  planer  les  alcyons. 

Can  language  or  can  thought  be  lovelier  ?  if  so, 
the  one  possible  instance  is  to  be  sought  in  these 
succeeding  verses: 

Quand  l'enfant  jase  avec  I'ombre  qui  le  benit, 
La  fauvette,  attentive,  au  rebord  de  son  nid 
Se  dresse,  et  scs  petits  passent,  pensifs  et  freles, 
Leurs  tetes  a  travers  les  plumes  de  ses  ailes; 
La  mere  semble  dire  a  sa  couvee:  Entends, 
Et  tache  de  parler  aussi  bien. 


1 68  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

It  seems  and  is  not  strange  that  the  lips  which 
distil  such  honey  as  this  should  be  the  same  so 
often  touched  with  a  coal  of  fire  from  that  "altar 
of  Righteousness  "  where  ^schylus  was  wont  to 
worship.  The  twenty-first  section  of  the  second 
series  is  in  the  main  a  renewal  or  completion  of 
the  work  undertaken  in  the  immortal  Chdtiments. 
Even  in  that  awful  and  incomparable  book  of 
judgment  such  poems  as  La  Colere  dii  Bronze,  and 
the  two  following  on  the  traffic  of  servile  clerical 
rapacity  in  matters  of  death  and  burial,  would 
have  stood  high  among  the  stately  legions  of 
satire  which  fill  its  living  pages  with  the  sound 
and  the  splendor  of  righteous  battle  for  the  right; 
but  the  verses  with  which  Hugo  has  branded  the 
betrayer  of  Metz  and  Strasburg  are  hardly  to  be 
matched  except  by  those  with  which,  half  a  cen- 
tury ago,  he  branded  the  betrayer  of  the  Duchess 
of  Berry.  Truly  may  all  who  read  them  cry  out 
with  the  poet  at  their  close, 

Et  qui  done  maintenant  dit  qu'il  s'est  evade? 

In  Le  Cimetiere  d'Eylmi,  a  poem  to  which  we 
have  now  in  the  third  series  of  the  book  a  most 
noble  and  exquisite  pendant  {Paroles  de  mon 
Oncle),  all   the    Homeric   side  of  a  poet  born  of 


LA  LEG  END  E  DES  SIECLES.  169 

warlike  blood  comes  out  into  proud  and  bright 
relief.  There  is  no  better  fighting  in  the  Iliad;  it 
has  the  martial  precision  and  practical  fellow- 
feeling  which  animate  in  his  battle-pieces  the 
lagging  verse  of  Walter  Scott;  and  it  has,  of 
course,  that  omnipresent  breath  and  light  and  fire 
of  perfect  poetry  which  a  Scott  or  a  Byron  is 
never  quite  permitted  to  attain.  Beside  or  even 
above  these  two  poems,  that  other  which  com- 
memorates the  devotion  of  a  Vendean  peasant 
chief  will  be  set  in  the  hearts  of  all  readers  com- 
petent to  appreciate  either  heroic  action  or  heroic 
song. 

The  love  of  all  high  things  which  finds  one 
form  of  expression  in  warlike  sympathy  with 
warriors  who  can  live  and  die  for  something 
higher  than  personal  credit  or  success  takes  an- 
other and  as  natural  a  shape  in  the  poems  which 
are  inspired  by  love  and  worship  of  nature  and 
her  witness  for  liberty  and  purity  and  truth  in  the 
epic  evangel  of  august  and  indomitable  moun- 
tains. The  sublimest  cry  of  moral  passion  ever 
inspired  by  communion  in  spirit  with  these  is  ut- 
tered in  the  great  poem  on  the  Swiss  mercenaries 
of  the  seventeenth  century,  which  even  among 
its  fellows  stands  out  eminent  and  radiant  as  an 


1 70  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

Alp  at  sunrise.  Mountain  and  cataract,  the  stars 
and  the  snows,  never  yet  in  any  language  found 
such  a  singer  and  interpreter  as  this.  Two  or 
three  verses,  two  or  three  words,  suffice  for  him 
to  bring  before  us,  in  fresh  and  actual  presence, 
the  very  breath  of  the  hills  or  the  sea,  the  very 
lights  and  sounds  and  spaces  of  clouded  or  sunlit 
air.  Juvenal  is  not  so  strong  in  righteousness, 
nor  Pindar  so  sublime  in  illustration,  as  the  poet 
who  borrowed  from  nature  her  highest  symbols  to 
illustrate  the  glory  and  the  duty  of  righteous 
wrath  and  insuppressible  insurrection  against 
wrong-doing,  when  he  wrote  Le  Regiment  dii 
baron  Madruce. 

.  L'homme  s'est  vendu.     Soit.     A-t-on  dans  le  louage 
Compris  le  lac,  le  bois,  la  ronce,  le  nuage  ? 
La  nature  revient,  germe,  fleurit,  dissout, 
F^conde,  croit,  decroit,  rit,  passe,  efface  tout. 
La  Suisse  est  toujours  la,  libre.     Prend-on  au  piege 
La  precipice,  I'ombre  et  la  bise  et  la  neige  ? 
Signe-t-on  des  marches  dans  lesquels  il  soit  dit 
Que  rOrteler  s'enrole  et  devient  un  bandit? 
Quel  poing  cyclopeen,  diies,  6  roches  noires, 
Pourra  briser  la  Dent  de  Morcle  en  vos  machoires  ? 
Quel  assembleur  de  bceufs  pourra  forger  un  joug 
Qui  du  pic  de  Claris  aille  au  piton  de  Zoug  ? 
C'est  naturellement  que  les  monts  sont  fideles 
Et  purs,  ayant  la  forme  apre  des  citadelles, 


LA  LEGENDS  DES  SIECLES.  171 

Ayant  regu  de  Dieu  des  creneaux  ou  le  soir, 
L'homme  peut,  d'embrasure  en  embrasure,  voir 
Eiinceler  le  fer  de  lance  des  etoiles. 
Est-il  une  araignee,  aigle,  qui  dans  ses  toiles 
Puisse  prendre  la  trombe  et  la  rafale  et  toi  ? 
Quel  chef  recrutera  le  Saleve  ?  a  quel  roi 
Le  jNIythen  dira-t-il:   "  Sire,  je  vais  descendre  I 
Qu'apres  avoir  dompte  I'Athos,  quelque  Alexandre, 
Sorte  de  heros  monstre  aux  cornes  de  taureau, 
Aille  done  relever  sa  robe  a  la  Jungfrau  ! 
Comme  la  vierge,  ayant  I'ouragan  sur  I'epaule, 
Crachera  I'avalanche  a  la  face  du  drole  ! 


Non,  rien  n'est  mort  ici.     Tout  grandit,  et  s'en  vante. 

L'Helvetie  est  sacree,  et  la  Suisse  est  vivante; 

Ces  monts  sont  des  heros  et  des  religieux; 

Cette  nappe  de  neige  aux  plis  prodigieux 

D'ou  jaillit,  lorsqu'en  mai  la  tiede  brise  ondoie, 

Toute  une  floraison  folle  d'air  et  de  joie, 

Et  d'oij  sortent  des  lacs  et  des  flots  murmurants, 

N'est  le  linceul  de  rien,  excepte  des  tyrans. 

This  glorious  poem  of  the  first  series  finds  a 
glorious  echo  in  the  twenty-fifth  division  of  the 
second;  even  as  the  Pyrenean  cycle  which  open- 
ed in  the  first  series  is  brought  in  the  second  to 
fuller  completion  of  equal  and  corresponsive 
achievement.  It  is  wonderful,  even  in  this  vast 
world  of  poetic  miracle  where  nothing  is  other 
than  wonderful,  that  Masferrer  should  be  equal 


172  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

to  Aymerillot  in  frank  majesty  of  beauty;  that 
even  2S.\.qx  Le  Parricide -a.  fresh  depth  of  tragic  ter- 
ror should  be  sounded  by  Gdiffer-Jorge;  and  that 
after  all  he  had  already  written  on  fatherhood 
and  sonship,  on  duty  and  chivalry,  on  penitence 
and  pride,  Victor  Hugo  should  have  struck  so  new 
and  so  profound  a  note  as  rings  in  every  line  of 
La  Patertiite. 

But  of  all  echoes  and  of  all  responses  which  re- 
verberate from  end  to  end  of  these  three  great 
sections  of  song,  the  very  sweetest,  and  perhaps 
the  very  deepest,  are  those  evoked  by  love  of  lit- 
tle children,  and  compassionate  reverence  for  the 
poor.  If  but  one  division  were  to  be  left  us  out  of 
all  the  second  series,  and  fate  or  chance,  compar- 
atively compassionate  in  its  cruelty,  gave  us  our 
choice  which  this  one  should  be,  the  best  judg- 
ments might  perhaps  decide  to  preserve  the 
twenty-third  at  all  events.  What  the  words 
"realism"  and  "naturalism"  do  naturally  and 
really  signify  in  matters  of  art,  the  blatant  bab- 
blers who  use  them  to  signify  the  photography  of 
all  things  abject  might  learn,  if  shallow  insolence 
and  unclean  egotism  were  suddenly  made  capa- 
ble of  learning,  by  the  study  of  only  the  two 
poems  which  set  before  us  in  two  different  forms 


LA  LEGENDE  DBS  SIECLES.  173 

the  strength  of  weakness  in  the  child  whose  love 
redeems  his  father  from  death,  and  the  child  who 
can  find  no  comfort  but  in  death  for  the  lack  of  a 
father's  love.  There  is  nothing  in  Homer,  in 
Dante,  or  in  Shakespeare,  the  three  only  poets 
who  can  properly  be  cited  for  comparison,  of  a 
pathos  more  poignant  in  its  bitter  perfection  of 
sweetness. 

Among  the  many  good  things  which  seem,  for 
the  lovers  of  poetry,  to  have  come  out  of  one  and 
so  great  an  evil  as  the  long  exile  of  Hugo  from 
his  country,  there  is  none  better  or  greater  than 
the  spiritual  inhalation  of  breeze  and  brine  into 
the  very  heart  of  his  genius,  the  miraculous  im- 
pregnation of  his  solitary  Muse  by  the  sea-wind. 
This  influence  could  not  naturally  but  combine 
with  the  lifelong  influence  of  all  noble  sympathies 
to  attract  his  admiration  and  his  pity  towards  the 
poor  folk  of  the  shore,  and  to  produce  from  that 
sense  of  compassion  for  obscurer  sorrows  and 
brotherhood  with  humbler  heroism  than  his  own 
such  work  as  the  poem  which  describes  the  chari- 
ty of  a  fisherman's  wife  towards  the  children  of 
her  dead  neighbor.  It  has  all  the  beautiful  pre- 
cision and  accurate  propriety  of  detail  which  dis- 
tinguish the  finest  idyls  of  Theocritus  or  Tenny- 


174  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

son,  with  a  fervor  of  pathetic  and  imaginative 
emotion  which  Theocritus  never  attained,  and 
which  Tennyson  has  attained  but  once.  All  the 
horror  of  death,  all  the  trouble  and  mystery  of 
darkness,  seem  as  we  read  to  pass  into  our  fancy 
with  the  breath  of  pervading  night,  and  to  vanish 
with  the  husband's  entrance  at  sunrise  before  the 
smile  with  which  the  wife  draws  back  the  curtains 
of  the  cradle. 

This  poem,  which  so  many  hearts  must  have 
treasured  among  their  choicest  memories  for  now 
so  many  years,  has  found  at  length  its  fellow  in 
the  final  volume  of  the  book.  There  is  even  more 
savor  of  the  sea  in  the  great  lyric  landscape  called 
Les  paysans  an  bordde  la  mer  than  in  the  idyllic  in- 
terior called  Les  paiivres  gens.  There  we  felt  the 
sea-wind  and  saw  the  sea-mist  through  the  chinks 
of  door  and  window;  but  here  we  feel  all  the 
sweep  of  the  west  wind's  wings,  and  see  all  the 
rush  of  rain  along  the  stormy  shore  that  the  flock 
of  leaping  waves  has  whitened  with  the  shred- 
dings  of  their  fleece.  We  remember  in  Les  Voix 
Intcrieures  the  all  but  matchless  music  of  the  song 
of  the  sea-wind's  trumpet,  and  in  the  notes  of  this 
new  tune  we  find  at  last  that  music  matched  and 
deepened  and  prolonged.     In  the  great  lyric  book 


LA  LEGEXDE  DES  SIECEES.  175 

which  gives  us  the  third  of  the  four  blasts  blown 
from  Les  Quatre  Vents  de  V Esprit,  there  are  vis- 
ions as  august  and  melodies  as  austere  as  this;  but 
outside  the  vast  pale  of  the  master's  work  we 
should  look  for  the  likeness  of  such  songs  in  vain. 
The  key  of  all  its  tenderness  if  not  of  all  its  ter- 
ror is  struck  in  these  two  first  verses. 

Les  pauvres  gens  de  la  cote, 
L'hiver,  quand  la  mer  est  haute 

Et  qu'il  fait  nuit, 
Viennent  ou  finit  la  terre 
Voir  les  flots  pleins  de  mystere 

Et  pleins  de  bruit, 

lis  sondent  la  mer  sans  bornes; 
lis  pensent  aux  ecueils  mornes 

Et  triomphants; 
L'orpheline  pale  et  seule 
Crie:  6  men  pere  !  et  I'aieule 

Dit:  mes  enfants  ! 

The  verses  which  translate  the  landscape  are 
as  absolutely  incomparable  in  their  line  as  those 
which  render  the  emotion  of  the  watchers.  Wit- 
ness this: — 

Et  Ton  se  met  en  prieres, 
Pendant  que  joncs  et  bruyeres 
Et  bois  touffus, 


176  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

Vents  sans  borne  et  flots  sans  nombre, 
Jettent  dans  toute  cette  ombre 
Des  cris  confus. 

Here,  as  usual,  it  is  the  more  tragic  aspect  of 
the  waters  that  would  appear  to  have  most  deeply 
impressed  the  sense  or  appealed  to  the  spirit  of 
Victor  Hugo.  He  seems  to  regard  the  sea  with 
yet  more  of  awe  than  of  love,  as  he  may  be  said 
to  regard  the  earth  with  even  more  of  love  than 
of  awe.  He  has  put  no  song  of  such  sweet  and 
profound  exultation,  such  kind  and  triumphant 
motherhood,  into  the  speaking  spirit  of  the  sea 
as  into  the  voice  of  the  embodied  earth.  He  has 
heard  in  the  waves  no  word  so  bountiful  and 
benignant  as  the  message  of  such  verses  as 
these: — 

La  terre  est  calme  aupres  de  I'ocean  grondeur; 
La  terre  est  belle;  elle  a  la  divine  pudeur 

De  se  cacher  sous  les  feuillages; 
Le  printemps  son  amant  vient  en  mai  la  baiser; 
Elle  envoie  au  tonnerre  aliier  pour  I'apaiser 

La  fum6e  humble  des  villages. 

Ne  frappe  pas,  tonnerre.     lis  sonts  petits,  ceux-ci. 
La  terre  est  bonne;  elle  est  grave  et  severe  aussi; 

Les  roses  sont  pares  comme  elle; 
Quiconque  pense,  espere  et  travaille  lui  plait; 


LA  LmENDE  DES  SINGLES  i^j 

Et  I'innocence  offerte  a  tout  homme  est  son  lait, 
Et  la  justice  est  sa  mamelle. 

La  terre  cache  Tor  et  montre  les  moissons; 
Elle  met  dans  le  flanc  des  fuyantes  saisons 

Le  germe  des  saisons  prochaines, 
Dans  I'azur  les  oiseaux  qui  chuchotent:  aimons ! 
Et  les  sources  au  fond  de  I'omhre,  et  sur  les  monts 

L'immense  tremblement  des  chenes. 

The  loving  loveliness  of  these  divine  verses  is 
in  sharp  contrast  with  the  fierce  resonance  of 
those  in  which  the  sea's  defiance  is  cast  as  a  chal- 
lenge to  the  hopes  and  dreams  of  mankind: — 

Je  suis  la  vaste  melee. 
Reptile,  etant  I'onde,  ail^e, 

Etant  le  vent; 
Force  et  fuite,  haine  et  vie, 
Houle  immense,  poursuivie 

Et  poursuivant. 

The  motion  of  the  sea  was  never  till  now  so 
perfectly  done  into  words  as  in  these  three  last 
lines;  but  any  one  to  whom  the  water  was  as 
dear  or  dearer  than  the  land  at  its  loveliest  would 
have  found  a  delight  as  of  love  no  less  conceiv- 
able than  a  passion  as  of  hatred  in  the  more  vis- 
ible and  active  life  of  waves,  and  at  least  as 
palpable  to  the  "  shaping  spirit  of  imagination." 


178  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

It  remains  true,  after  all,  for  the  greatest  as  for 
the  humblest,  that — in  the  words  of  one  of  the 
very  few  poets  whose  verses  are  fit  to  quote  even 
after  a  verse  of  Hugo's — 

we  receive  but  what  we  give, 
And  in  our  life  alone  doth  nature  live; 

so  far,  at  least,  as  her  life  concerns  us,  and  is  per- 
ceptible or  appreciable  by  our  spirit  or  our  sense. 
A  magnificent  instance  of  purely  dramatic  vision, 
in  which  the  lyric  note  is  tempered  to  the  circum- 
stance of  the  speakers  with  a  kind  of  triumphant 
submission  and  severe  facility,  is  La  Chanso7i  des 
Doreiirs  de  Proues.  The  poet's  unequalled  and 
unapproached  variety  in  mastery  of  metre  and 
majesty  of  color  and  splendid  simplicity  .of  style, 
no  less  exact  than  sublime,  and  no  less  accurate 
than  passionate,  could  hardly  be  better  shown 
than  by  comparison  of  the  opening  verses  with 
the  stanza  cited  above. 

Nous  sommes  les  doreurs  de  proues. 
Les  vents,  tournant  comme  des  roues, 
Sur  la  verte  rondeur  des  eaux 
Melent  les  lueurs  et  les  ombres, 
Et  dans  les  plis  des  vagues  sombres 
Trainent  les  obliques  vaisseaux. 


LA  LEGENDE  DES  SIECLES.  179 

La  bouirasque  decrit  des  courbes, 
Les  vents  sont  tortueux  et  fourbes, 
L'archer  noir  souffle  dans  son  cor, 
Ces  bruits  s'ajoutent  aux  vertiges, 
Et  c'est  nous  qui  dans  ces  prodiges 
Faisons  roder  des  spectres  d'or. 

Car  c'est  un  spectre  que  la  proue. 
Le  {lot  I'etreint,  I'air  la  secoue; 
Fiere,  elle  sort  de  nos  bazars 
Pour  servir  aux  eclairs  de  cible, 
Et  pour  etre  un  regard  terrible 
Parmi  les  sinistres  hasards. 

It  is  more  than  fifty  years  since  Les  Orientales 
rose,  radiant  upon  the  world  of  letters,  and  the 
hand  which  gave  them  to  mankind  has  lost  so 
little  of  its  cunning  that  we  are  well-nigh  tempted 
to  doubt  whether  then,  for  all  its  skill  and  sure- 
ness  of  touch,  it  had  quite  the  same  strength  and 
might  of  magnificent  craftsmanship  as  now. 
There  was  fire  as  well  as  music  on  the  lips  of  the 
young  man,  but  the  ardor  of  the  old  man's  song 
seems  even  deeper  and  keener  than  the  passion  of 
his  past.  The  fervent  and  majestic  verses  of  June 
2,  1883,  strike  at  starting  the  note  of  measureless 
pity  and  immeasurable  indignation  which  rings 
throughout  the  main  part  of  the  fifth  and  last  vol- 
ume almost  louder  and  fuller,  if  possible,  than  it 


i8o  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

was  wont.  All  Victor  Hugo,  we  may  say,  is  in 
this  book;  it  is  as  one  of  those  ardent  evening 
skies  in  which  sunrise  and  sunset  seem  one  in  the 
flush  of  overarching  color  which  glows  back  from 
the  Avest  to  the  east  with  reverberating  bloom  and 
fervor  of  rose-blossom  and  fire.  There  is  life 
enough  in  it,  enough  of  the  breath  and  spirit  and 
life-blood  of  living  thought,  to  vivify  a  whole  gen- 
eration of  punier  souls  and  feebler  hearts  with  the 
heat  of  his  fourscore  years.  It  may  be  doubted 
whether  there  ever  lived  a  poet  and  leader  of  men 
to  whom  these  glorious  verses  would  be  so  closely 
applicable  as  to  their  writer. 

Un  grand  esprit  en  marche  a  ses  rumeurs,  ses  houles, 

Ses  chocs,  et  fait  fremir  profondement  les  foules, 

Et  remue  en  passant  le  monde  autour  de  lui. 

On  est  epouvante  si  Ton  n'est  ebloui; 

L'homme  comme  un  nuage  erre  et  change  de  forme; 

Nul,  si  petit  qu'il  soit,  echappe  au  souffle  enorme; 

Les  plus  humbles,  pendant  qu'il  parle,  ont  le  frisson. 

Ainsi  quand,  6vade  dans  le  vaste  horizon, 
L'aquilon  qui  se  hate  et  qui  cherche  aventure 
Tord  la  pluie  et  Teclair,  comme  de  sa  ceinture 
Une  fille  d^fait  en  souriant  le  noeud, 
Quand  I'immense  vent  gronde  et  passe,  tout  s'emeut. 
Pas  un  brin  d'herbe  au  fond  des  ravins,  que  ne  touche 
Cette  rapid ite  formidable  et  farouche. 


LA  LEGENDS  DES  SIECLES.  i8i 

And  this  wind  "  bloweth  where  it  listeth":  now 
it  comes  to  us  charged  with  all  the  heart  of  all 
the  roses  in  the  world;  its  breath  when  it  blows 
towards  Greece  has  in  it  a  murmur  as  of  Shelley's 
Epipsychidion;  the  caress  of  its  love-making  has 
all  the  freedom  and  all  the  purity  of  Blake's;  now 
it  passes  by  us  in  darkness,  from  depth  to  depth 
of  the  bitter  mystery  of  night.  A  vision  of  ruined 
worlds,  the  floating  purgatorial  prisons  of  ruined 
souls,  adrift  as  hulks  on  the  sea  of  darkness  ever- 
lasting, shows  us  the  harvest  in  eternity  of  such 
seed  as  was  sown  in  time  by  the  hands  of  such 
guides  and  rulers  of  men  as  we  hear  elsewhere 
speaking  softly  with  each  other  in  the  shadows, 
within  hail  of  the  confessional  and  the  scaffold. 
The  loftiest  words  of  counsel  sound  sweeter  in 
the  speech  of  this  great  spirit  than  the  warmest 
whispers  of  pleasure;  and  again,  the  heaviest 
stroke  of  damning  satire  is  succeeded  by  the  ten- 
derest  touch  of  a  compassion  that  would  leave 
not  a  bird  in  captivity.  The  hand  that  opens 
the  cage-door  is  the  same  which  has  just  turned 
the  key  on  the  braggart  swordsman,  neither  "vic- 
torious "  nor  "dead,"  but  condemned  to  everlast- 
ing prison  behind  the  bars  of  iron  verse. 

But  the  two  long  poems  which  dominate  the 


1 82  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

book,  like  two  twin  summits  clothed  round  with 
fiery  cloud  and  crowned  with  stormy  sunshine, 
tower  equal  in  height  and  mass  of  structure  with 
the  stateliest  in  the  two  parts  preceding.  The 
voice  that  rolls  throughout  Les  Qiuitre  Jours 
d'Elciis  the  thunder  of  its  burning  words  reawak- 
ens and  prolongs  the  echo  of  Feli-bien's  pity  and 
wrath  over  the  murdered  corpse  of  a  child  un- 
born; we  recognize  in  the  speaker  a  kinsman  of 
Welfs,  the  unconquerable  old  castellan  of  Osbor, 
delivered  only  by  an  act  of  charity  into  the 
treacherous  hands  of  the  princes  whom  his  cit- 
adel had  so  long  defied.  Of  Elciis,  as  of  him, 
the  poet  might  have  said — 

Si  la  mer  prononfait  des  noms  dans  ses  mardes, 
O  vieil'ard,  ce  serait  des  noms  comme  le  tien. 

Such  names  will  no  doubt  provoke  the  soft 
superior  smile  of  a  culture  too  refined  for  any  sort 
of  enthusiasm  but  the  elegant  ecstasy  of  self- 
worship;  and  such  simplicity  will  excite,  on  the 
other  hand,  a  deep-mouthed  bray  of  scorn  from 
the  whole  school  or  church  whose  apostle  in 
France  was  St.  Joseph  de  Maistre,  in  England 
St.  Thomas  Coprostom,  late  of  Craigenputtock 
and  Chelsea;  the  literary  lappers  of  imaginary 
blood,  the  inkhorn  swordsmen  and  spokesmen  of 


LA  LEGENDE  DES  SIECLES.  183 

immaterial  iron.  The  rage  of  their  contempt  for 
such  as  Hugo,  the  loathing  of  their  scorn  for  such 
as  Shelley,  ought  long  since  to  have  abashed  the 
believers  in  principles  which  find  no  abler  defend- 
ers or  more  effective  champions  than  these. 

For  it  is  true  that  the  main  truths  preached  and 
enforced  and  insisted  on  by  such  fanatical  rhetor- 
icians as  Milton,  as  Mazzini,  or  as  Hugo,  are  as 
old  as  the  very  notion  of  right  and  wrong,  as  the 
rudest  and  crudest  conception  of  truth  itself;  and 
it  is  undeniable  that  the  Gospel  according  to  St. 
Coprostom  has  the  invaluable  merit  of  pungent 
eccentricity  and  comparatively  novel  paradox. 
The  evangelist  of  "  golden  silence  " — whose  own 
speech,  it  may  be  admitted,  was  "quite  other" 
than  "silvern" — is  logically  justified  in  his  blatant 
but  ineffable  contempt  for  the  dull  old  doctrines 
of  mere  mercy  and  righteousness,  of  liberty  that 
knows  no  higher  law  than  duty,  of  duty  that  de- 
pends for  its  existence  on  the  existence  of  lib- 
erty. Such  a  creed,  in  the  phrase  of  a  brother 
philosopher  whose  "  reminiscences  "  may  be  gath- 
ered from  Shakespeare,  and  whose  views  of  his 
contemporaries  were  identical  in  tone  and  ex- 
pression with  the  opinions  of  Mr.  Carlyle  on  his, 
was  mouldy  before   our  grandsires  had  nails  on 


1 84  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

their  toes.  It  is  far  more  intelligent,  more  ori- 
ginal, more  ingenious  than  all  the  old  cant  and 
rant  against  priests  and  kings  and  vow-breakers 
and  blood-spillers,  to  discover  the  soul  of  good- 
ness in  Ratbert  the  Second  or  Napoleon  the 
Third,  and  observingly  distil  it  out  into  analytic 
and  monodramatic  blank  verse.  And  it  will  never 
be  said  that  this  reaction  against  the  puerile  or 
senile  preference  of  right  to  wrong  and  principle 
to  prosperity  has  not  been  carried  far  enough  in 
our  time.  Carlyle,  the  man  of  brass,  and  Musset, 
the  man  of  clay,  as  far  apart  on  all  other  points 
as  two  writers  of  genius  could  well  be,  have  shown 
themselves  at  one  in  high-souled  scorn  for  "prin- 
ciples of  mere  rebellion "  such  as  Landor's  and 
Milton's,  or  for  such  "belief  in  a  new  Brutus"  as 
might  disturb  the  dream  of  Augustulus.  But, 
even  as  an  old  paradox  becomes  with  time  a 
commonplace,  so  does  an  old  commonplace  be- 
come in  its  turn  a  paradox;  and  a  generation 
whose  poets  and  historians  have  long  blown  the 
trumpet  before  the  legitimacy  of  Romanoffs  or 
the  bastardy  of  Bonapartes  may  properly  be  star- 
tled and  scandalized  at  the  childish  eccentricity 
of  an  old-world  idealist  who  maintains  his  obso- 
lete and  preposterous  belief  that  massacre  is  mur- 


LA  LEG  END  E  DES  SIECLES.  185 

der,  that  robbery  is  theft,  and  that  perjury  is 
treason.  No  newer  doctrine,  no  sounder  phi- 
losophy, no  riper  wisdom  than  this,  can  be  gath- 
ered from  the  declamations  of  those  idle  old  men 
— as  Goneril,  for  example,  would  have  called 
them — who  speak  this  poet's  mind  again  and 
again  in  verse  which  has  no  more  variety  of 
splendor  or  magnificence  of  music  than  the  sea. 

Helas,  on  voit  encor  les  astres  se  lever, 
L'aube  sur  I'Apennin  jeter  sa  clarte  douce, 
L'oiseau  faire  son  nid  avec  des  brins  de  mousse. 
La  mcr  battre  les  rocs  dans  ses  flux  et  reflux, 
Mais  la  grandeur  des  coeurs  C'est  ce  qu'on  ne  voit  plus. 

There  is  nothing  ingenious  in  that;  it  is  no  bet- 
ter, intellectually  considered,  than  a  passage  of 
Homer  or  Isaiah. 

But  though  every  verse  has  the  ring  of  tested 
gold,  and  every  touch  gives  notice  of  the  master's 
hand,  yet  the  glory  even  of  these  Four  Days  is 
eclipsed  by  the  Vi'swn  of  Da7ite.  Far  apart  and 
opposite  as  they  stand  in  all  matters  of  poetic 
style  and  method — Dante  writing  with  the  rigid 
and  reserved  concision  of  a  Tacitus,  Hugo  with 
the  rushing  yet  harmonious  profusion  of  a  Pindar 
— the  later  master  is  the  only  modern  poet  who 
could  undertake  without  absurdity  or  presumption 


1 86  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

to  put  words  worthy  of  Dante  into  Dante's  mouth. 
The  brazen  clatter  of  Byron's  Prophecy  was  not 
redeemed  or  brought  into  tune  by  the  noble  en- 
ergy and  sound  insight  of  the  political  sympathies 
expressed  in  the  accent  of  a  stump-orator  to  the 
tune  of  a  barrel-organ.  But  a  verse  of  Hugo's 
falls  often  as  solid  and  weighty  and  sure,  as  full 
in  significance  of  perfect  and  pregnant  sound,  as 
even  a  verse  of  Alighieri's.  He  therefore,  but  he 
alone,  had  the  power  and  the  right  to  call  up  the 
spirit  of  Dante  now  thirty  years  ago,  and  bid  it 
behold  all  the  horrors  of  Europe  in  1853;  the 
Europe  of  Haynau  and  Radetzky,  of  Nicholas 
the  First  and  Napoleon  the'  last.  Any  great 
modern  poet's  notion  of  an  everlasting  hell  must 
of  course  be  less  merely  material  than  Dante's 
mechanism  of  hot  and  cold  circles,  fire  and  ice, 
ordure  and  mire;  but  here  is  the  same  absolute 
and  equitable  assent  to  justice,  the  same  fierce 
and  ardent  fidelity  to  conscience,  the  same  logic 
and  the  same  loyalty  as  his. 

O  sentence  !  6  peine  sans  refuge ! 
Tomber  dans  le  silence  et  la  brume  a  jamais  ! 
D'abord  quelque  clarte  des  lumineux  sommets 
Vous  laisse  distinguer  vos  mains  desesperees. 
On  tombe,  on  voit  passer  des  formes  effarees, 


LA  LEG  END  E  DES  SIECLES.  187 

Bouches  ouvertes,  fronts  ruisselants  de  sueur, 

Des  visages  hideux  qu'eclaire  ude  lueur. 

Puis  on  ne  voit  plus  rien.     Tout  s'efface  et  recule. 

La  nuit  morne  succede  au  sombre  crepuscule. 

On  tombe.    On  n'est  pas  seul  dans  ces  limbes  d'en  bas; 

On  sent  frissonner  ceux  qu'on  no  distingue  pas; 

On  ne  sait  si  ce  sont  des  hydres  ou  des  hommes; 

On  se  sent  devenir  les  larves  que  nous  sommes; 

On  entrevoit  I'liorreur  des  lieux  inaper9us, 

Et  I'abime  au-dessous,  et  Tabime  au-dessus. 

Puis  tout  est  vide  !  on  est  le  grain  que  le  vent  seme. 

On  n'entend  pas  le  cri  qu'on  a  pouse  soi-meme; 

On  sent  les  profondeurs  qui  s'emparent  de  vous; 

Les  mains  ne  peuvent  plus  atteindre  les  genoux; 

On  leve  au  del  les  yeux  et  Ton  voit  I'ombre  horrible; 

On  est  dans  I'impalpable,  on  est  dans  I'invisible; 

Des  souffles  par  moments  passent  dans  cette  nuit. 

Puis  on  ne  sent  plus  rien. — Pas  un  vent,  pas  un  bruit, 

Pas  un  souffle;  la  mort,  la  nuit;  nulle  rencontre; 

Rien  pas  meme  une  chute  affreuse  ne  se  montre 

Et  I'on  songe  a  la  vie,  au  soleil,  aux  amours, 

Et  Ton  pense  toujours,  et  Ton  tombe  toujours  ! 

The  resurrection  of  the  victims  to  give  evidence 
at  the  summons  of  the  archangel — a  heavy  cloud 
of  witnesses, 

Triste,  livide,  enorme,  ayant  un  air  de  rage — 

men  bound  to  the  yoke  like  beasts,  women  with 
bosoms  gashed   by  the   whip,  children  with   their 


1 88  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

skulls  cleft  open — is  direful  as  any  less  real  and 
actual  vision  of  the  elder  hell. 

Les  oris  d'enfant  surtout  venaient  a  men  oreille; 
Car,  dans  cette  nuit-la,  gouffre  ou  I'equite  veille, 
La  voix  del  innocents  sur  toute  autre  prevaut, 
C'est  le  cri  des  enfants  qui  monte  le  plus  haut, 
Et  le  vagissement  fait  le  bruit  du  tonnerre. 

The  appeal  for  justice  which  follows,  with  its 
enumeration  of  horrors  unspeakable  except  by 
history  and  poetry,  is  followed  in  its  turn  by  the 
evocation  of  the  soldiers  whom  this  army  of  mar- 
tyrs has  with  one  voice  designated  to  the  angel 
of  judgment  as  their  torturers  and  murderers. 
The  splendid  and  sonorous  verses  in  which  the 
muster  of  these  legions  after  legions,  with  their 
garments  rolled  in  blood,  is  made  to  defile  before 
the  eyes  of  reader  or  hearer,  can  be  matched  only 
by  the  description  of  the  Swiss  mercenaries  in  Le 
Regiment  dii  baron  Madruce. 

Un  grand  vautour  dore  les  guidait  comme  un  phare. 
Tant  qu'ils  etaient  au  fond  de  I'ombre,  la  fanfare, 
Comme  un  aigle  agitant  ses  bruyants  ailerons, 
Chantait  claire  et  joyeuse  au  front  des  escadrons, 
Trompeites  et  tambours  sonnaient,  et  des  centaures 
Frappaient  des  rends  de  cuivre  entre  leurs  mains  sonores; 
Mais,  des  qu'ils  arrivaient  devant  le  flamboiement, 
Les  clairons  effares  se  taisaient  brusquement, 


LA  LEGEND E  DES  SIECLES.  189 

Tout  ce  bruit  s  eteignait.     Reculant  en  desordre, 
Leurs  chevaux  se  cabraient  et  cherchaient  a  les  mordre, 
Et  la  lance  et  I'epee  echappaient  a  leur  poing. 

Challenged  to  make  answer,  the  assassins  of 
Italy  and  Hungary  plead  that  they  were  but  the 
sword,  their  captains  were  the  hand.  These  are 
summoned  in  their  turn,  and  cast  their  crimes  in 
turn  upon  the  judges  who  bade  them  shed  blood 
and  applauded  their  blood-shedding  in  the  name 
of  law  and  justice.  And  the  judges  and  lawgivers 
are  summoned  in  their  stead. 

Ces  hommes  regardaient  I'ange  d'un  air  surpris: 
Comme,  en  lettres  de  feu,  rayonnait  sur  sa  face 
Son  nom,  Justice,  entre  eux  ils  disaient  a  voix  basse: 
Que  veut  dire  ce  mot  qu'il  porta  sur  son  front  ? 

Charged  with  their  complicity  in  all  the  public 
crime  and  shame  and  horror  of  their  period,  these 
in  turn  cast  the  burden  of  their  wrong-doing  on 
the  princes  who  commanded  them  and  they 
obeyed,  seeing  how  the  priests  and  soothsayers 
had  from  all  time  assured  them  that  kings  were 
the  images  of  God.  The  images  of  God  are  sum- 
moned, and  appear,  in  the  likeness  of  every  form 
of  evil  imaginable  by  man. 

Devant  chaque  fantome,  en  la  brume  glacce, 
Ayant  le  vague  aspect  d'une  croix  renversee, 


190  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

Venait  un  glaive  nu,  ferme  et  droit  dans  le  vent, 
Qu'aucun  bras  ne  tenait  etqui  semblait  vivant. 

Strange  shapes  of  winged  and  monstrous  beasts 
were  harnessed  to  the  chariots  on  which  the 
thrones  of  the  earth  were  borne  forward.  The 
figure  seated  on  the  last  of  them  will  be  recog- 
nizable beyond  all  possibility  of  mistake  by  any 
reader  whose  eyes  have  ever  rested  on  a  face 
which  beyond  most  human  faces  bore  the  visible 
image  and  superscription  of  the  soul  behind  it. 

Les  trones  approchaient  sous  les  lugubres  cieux; 
On  entendait  gemir  autour  des  nuirs  essieux 
La  clameur  de  tous  ceiix  qu'avaient  broyes  leurs  roues; 
lis  venaient,  ils  fendaient  rombre  comme  des  proues; 
Sous  un  souffle  invisible  ils  semblaient  se  mouvoir; 
Rien  n'eiait  plus  6trange  et  plus  farouche  a  voir 
Que  ces  chars  effrayants  tourbillonnant  dans  rombre. 
Dans  le  gouffre  tranquille  ovi  I'humanite  sombre, 
Ces  trones  de  la  terre  apparaissaient  hideux. 

Le  dernier  qui  venait,  horrible  au  milieu  d'eux, 
Etait  a  chaque  marche  encombre  de  squelettes 
Et  de  cadavres  froids  aux  bouches  violettes, 
Et  le  plancher  rougi  fumait,  de  sang  baigne; 
Le  char  qui  le  portait  dans  Tombre  etait  train6 
Par  un  hibou  tenant  dans  sa  grifFe  une  hache. 
Un  etre  aux  yeux  de  loup,  homme  par  la  moustache, 
Au  sommet  de  ce  char  s'agitait  etonne, 
Et  se  courbait  furtif.  livide  et  couronnd 


LA  LEG  END E  DES  SIECLES.  191 

Pas  un  deces  cesars  a  I'allure  guerriere 
Ne  regardait  cet  homme.     A  I'ecart,  et  derriere, 
Vetu  d'un  noir  manteau  qui  semblait  un  linceul, 
Espece  de  lepreux  du  trone,  il  venait  seul; 
II  posait  les  deux  mains  sur  sa  face  morose 
Comme  pour  empccher  qu'on  y  vit  quelque  chose; 
Quand  parfuis  il  otait  ses  mains  en  se  baissant, 
En  lettres  qui  semblaient  faites  avec  du  sang 
On  lisait  sur  son  front  ces  trois  mots: — Je  le  jure. 

It  is  a  fearful  thing,  said  the  Hebrew,  to  fall 
into  the  hands  of  the  living  God;  and  it  is  a  fear- 
ful thing  for  a  malefactor  to  fall  into  the  hands  of 
an  ever-living  poet.  The  injured  Caesars  of  Rome 
— Tiberius,  for  example,  and  Domitian — have  not 
even  yet  been  delivered  by  the  most  conscientious 
efforts  of  German  and  Anglo-German  Cssarists 
out  of  the  prison  whose  keys  are  kept  by  Juvenal; 
and  a  greater  than  Juvenal  is  here. 

Summoned  to  make  answer  to  the  charge  of 
the  angel  of  judgment,  even  these  also  have  their 
resource  for  evasion,  and  cast  all  their  crimes 
upon  the  Pope. 

II  nous  disait:  Je  suis  celui  qui  parle  aux  rois; 
Quiconque  me  resiste  et  me  brave  est  impie, 
Ce  qu'ici-bas  j'ecris,  la-haut  Dieu  le  copie. 
L'eglise,  mon  epouse,  eclose  au  mont  Thabor, 
A  fait  de  la  doctrine  une  cage  aux  fils  d'or, 
Et  comme  des  oiseaux  j'y  tiens  toutes  les  ames. 


192  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

This  man  had  blessed  the  murderers  in  their 
triumph,  and  cursed  their  victims  in  the  grave: — 

Sa  ceinlure  servait  de  corde  a  nos  potences. 
II  liait  de  ses  mains  I'agneau  sous  nos  sentences; 
Et  quand  on  nous  criait:  Grace  !  il  nous  criait:  Feu  I 
C'est  a  lui  que  le  mal  revient.     Voila,  grand  Dieu, 
Ce  qu'il  a  fait:  voila  ce  qu'il  nous  a  fait  faire. 
Cet  homme  etait  le  pole  et  I'axe  de  la  sphere; 
II  est  le  responsable  et  nous  le  denon9ons  ! 
Seigneur,  nous  n'avons  fait  que  suivre  ses  legons, 
Seigneur,  nous  n'avons  fait  que  suivre  son  exemple. 

And  the  pontiff  whose  advent  and  whose  prom- 
ises had  been  hailed  with  such  noble  trust  and 
acclaimed  with  such  noble  thankfulness  by  those 
who  believed  in  him  as  a  deliverer — by  Lander 
among  others,  and  by  Hugo  himself — the  Caia- 
phas-Iscariot  whose  benediction  and  consecrated 
massacre  and  anointed  perjury  with  the  rancid 
oil  of  malodorous  gladness  above  its  fellows  in 
empire  and  in  crime — is  summoned  out  of  dark- 
ness to  receive  sentence  by  the  sevenfold  sound- 
ing of  trumpets. 

Vetu  de  lin  plus  blanc  qu'un  encensoir  qui  fume, 
II  avait,  spectre  bleme  aux  idoles  pareil, 
Les  baisers  de  la  foule  empreints  sur  son  orteil, 
Dans  sa  droite  un  baton  comme  I'antique  archonte, 
Sur  son  front  la  tiare,  et  dans  ses  yeux  la  honte. 


LA  LEGENDE  DES  SIECLES.  193 

De  son  cou  descendait  un  long  manteau  dor^, 
Et  dans  son  poignet  gauche  il  tenait,  effare, 
Comme  un  voleur  surpris  par  celui  qu'il  derobe, 
Des  clefs  qu'il  essayait  de  cacher  sous  sa  robe. 
II  eiait  effrayant  a  force  de  terreur. 

Quand  surgit  ce  vieillard,  on  vit  dans  la  lueur 
L'ombre  et  le  mouvement  de  quelqu'un  qui  se  penche. 
A  I'apparition  de  cette  robe  blanche, 
Au  plus  noir  de  Tabime  un  tonnerre  gronda. 

Then  from  all  points  of  the  immeasurable 
spaces,  from  the  womb  of  the  cloud  7lx\A  the 
edge  of  the  pit,  is  witness  given  against  Pope 
Pius  IX.  by  the  tyrants  and  the  victims,  mothers 
and  children  and  old  men,  the  judges  and  the 
judged,  the  murderers  mingling  with  the  mur- 
dered, great  and  small,  obscure  and  famous. 

Tous  ceux  que  j'avais  vus  passer  dans  les  tenebres, 
Avancant  leur  front  triste,  ouvrant  leur  oeil  terni, 
Fourmillement  affreux  qui  peuplait  I'infini, 
Tous  ces  spectres,  vivant,  parlant,  riant  naguere, 
Martyrs,  bourreaux,  et  gens  du  peuple  et  gens  de  guerre, 
Regardant  rhomme  blanc  d'epouvante  ebloui, 
Eleverent  la  main  et  crierent:  C'est  lui. 

Et  pendant  qu'ils  criaient,  sa  robe  devint  rouge. 

Au  fond  du  goufFre  ou  rien  ne  tressaille  et  ne  bouge 
Un  echo  repeta: — C'est  lui  ! — Les  sombres  rois 
Dirent: — C'est  lui  !  c'est  lui  !  c'est  lui  !  voila  sa  croix  ! 


194  A   STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

Les  clefs  du  paradis  sont  dans  ses  mains  fatales. — 
Et  I'homme-loup,  debout  sur  les  cadavres  pales 
Dont  le  sang  tiede  encor  tombait  dans  I'infini, 
Criad'une  voix  rauque  et  sourde: — 11  m'a  beni  ! 

A  judgment  less  terrible  than  what  follows  is 
that  by  which  Dante  longago  made  fast  the  gates 
of  hell  upon  Nicholas  and  Boniface  and  Clement 
with  one  stroke  of  his  inevitable  hand.  The  ghast- 
ly agony  of  the  condemned  is  given  with  all  the 
bitterest  realism  of  the  great  elder  anti-papist 
who  sent  so  many  vicars  of  Christ  to  everlasting 
torment  for  less  offences  than  those  of  Mastai- 
Ferretti. 

Lui  se  tourna  vers  I'ange  en  frissonnant, 
Er  je  vis  le  spectacle  horrible  et  surprenant 
D'un  homme  qui  vieillit  pendant  qu'on  le  regarde. 
L'agonie  eteignit  sa  prunelle  hagarde, 
Sa  bouche  begaya,  son  jarret  se  rompit, 
Ses  cheveux  blanchissaient  sur  son  front  decrepit, 
Ses  tempos  se  ridaient  comme  si  les  annees 
S'etaienl  subitement  sur  sa  face  acharnees, 
Ses }  eux  pleuraient,  ses  dents  claquaient  comme  au  gibet 
Les  genoux  d'un  squelette,  et  sa  peau  se  plombait, 
Etj  stupide,  il  baissait,  a  chaque  instant  plus  pale, 
S  a  tete  qu'ecrasait  la  tiare  papale. 

From  the  sentence  passed  upon  him  after  the 
avowal  extorted  by  the  angel  of  doom  that  he 
has  none  in  the  world  above  him  but  God  alone 


LA  LEGEND E  DES  SIECLES.  195 

on  whom  to  cast  the  responsibility  of  his  works, 
not  a  word  may  be  taken  away  for  the  purpose  of 
quotation,  as  not  a  word  could  have  been  added 
to  it  by  Dante  or  by  Ezekiel  himself.  But  about 
the  eternity  of  his  damnation  there  is  not,  happi- 
ly for  the  human  conscience,  any  manner  of  doubt 
possible;  it  must  endure  as  long  as  the  poem 
which  proclaims  it:  in  other  words,  as  long  as  the 
immortality  of  poetry  itself 

This  great  and  terrible  poem,  the  very  crown  or 
coping-stone  of  all  the  Clidtiincnts,  has  a  certain 
affinity  with  two  others  in  which  the  poet's  yearn- 
ing after  justice  and  mercy  has  borne  his  passion- 
ate imagination  as  high  and  far  as  here.  In 
Siiltan  Mourad  his  immeasurable  and  incompara- 
ble depth  of  pity  and  charity  seems  well  nigh  to 
have  swallowed  up  all  sense  of  necessary  retribu- 
tion: it  is  perhaps  because  the  portentous  array 
of  crimes  enumerated  is  remote  in  time  and  place 
from  all  experience  of  ours  that  conscience  can 
allow  the  tenderness  and  sublimity  of  its  inspira- 
tion to  justify  the  moral  and  ratify  the  sentence  of 
the  poem: — 

Viens  !  tu  fus  bon  un  jour,  sois  a  jamais  heureux. 
Entre,  transfigure  !  tes  crimes  tenebreux, 
O  roi,  derriere  toi  s'effacent  dans  les  gloires;   ' 
Toume  la  tete,  et  vois  blanchir  tes  ailes  noires. 


196  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

But  in  the  crowning  song  of  all  the  great  three 
cycles  every  need  and  every  instinct  of  the  spirit 
may  find  the  perfect  exaltation  of  content.  The 
vast  and  profound  sense  of  ultimate  and  inevita- 
ble equity  which  animates  every  line  of  it  is  as 
firm  and  clear  as  the  solid  and  massive  splendor 
of  its  articulate  expression.  The  date  of  it  is  out- 
side and  beyond  the  lapse  of  the  centuries  of  time; 
but  the  rule  of  the  law  of  righteousness  is  there 
more  evident  and  indisputable  than  ever  during 
the  flight  of  these.  Hardly  in  the  Hebrew  prophe- 
cies is  such  distinct  and  vivid  sublimity,  as  of 
actual  and  all  but  palpable  vision,  so  thoroughly 
impregnated  with  moral  and  spiritual  emotion. 
Not  a  verse  of  all  that  strike  root  into  the  mem- 
ory forever  but  is  great  alike  by  imagination  and 
by  faith.     In  such  a  single  line  as  this — 

Que  qui  n'entendit  pas  le  remords  I'entendrait — 

there  is  the  very  note  of  conscience  done  into 
speech,  cast  into  form,  forged  into  substance. 

Avec  de  I'equite  condensee  en  airain. 

But  this  couplet  for  immensity  of  imaginative 
range,  is  of  one  birth  with  the  sublimest  verses  in 
the  Book  of  Job: — 


LA  LEGEND E  DES  SIECLES.  197 

Et  toute  I'epouvante  eparse  au  ciel  est  sceur 
De  cet  impenetrable  et  morne  avertisseur. 

From  the  magnificent   overture  to  the  second 
series,  in  which  the  poet  has  embodied  in  audible 
and  visible  symbol  the  vision  whence  this  book 
was  conceived — a  vision  so  far  surpassing  the  per- 
haps  unconsciously  imitative   inspiration  of  the 
Apocalypse,  with  its  incurably  lame  and  arduously 
prosaic  efforts  to  reproduce  the  effect  or  mimic 
the   majesty   of  earlier   prophecies,    that  we  are 
amazed  if  not  scandalized  to  find  that  book  actu- 
ally bracketed  in  one  sublime  passage  of  this  pre- 
lude  with    the    greatest    spiritual    poem    in    the 
world,    the    Oresteia    of    ^schylus— the    reader 
would  infer  that  any  student  wishing  to  give   a 
notion  of  the  Legende  des  Siecles  ought  to  have 
dwelt  less  than  I  have  done  upon  a  few  of  its  in- 
numerable beauties,  and  more  than   I  have  done 
upon  the  impression  of  its  incomparable  grandeur. 
But  samples  of  pure  sweetness   and   beauty  are 
more  easily  and   perhaps  more  profitably  detach- 
ed for  quotation  from   their  context   than   sam- 
ples of  a  sublimity  which  can  only  be   felt  by  full 
and  appreciative   study  of  an  entire  and  perfect 
poem.     And  it  is  rather  from  the  prelude  itself 
than  from  any  possible  commentary  on  it  that  a 


198  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

thoughtful  and  careful  reader  will  seek  to  gather 
the  aim  and  meaning  of  the  book.  It  is  there 
likened  to  a  vast  disjointed  ruin  lit  by  gleams  of 
light — "  le  reste  effrayant  de  Babel" — a  palace 
and  a  charnel  in  one,  built  by  doom  for  death  to 
dwell  in: — 

Oia  se  posent  pourtant  parfois,  quand  elles  resent, 
De  la  fafon  dont  Taile  et  le  rayon  se  posent, 
La  liberte,  lumierc,  et  Tesperance,  oiseau. 

But  over  and  within  this  book — 

traduit 
Du  passe,  du  tombeau,  du  goufifre  et  de  la  nuit — - 

faith  shines  as  a  kindling  torch,  hope  breathes  as 
a  quickening  wind,  love  burns  as  a  cleansing  fire. 
It  is  tragic,  not  with  the  hopeless  tragedy  of 
•Dante  or  the  all  but  hopeless  tragedy  of  Shake- 
speare. Whether  we  can  or  cannot  share  the 
infinite  hope  and  inviolable  faith  to  which  the 
whole  active  and  suffering  life  of  the  poet  has 
borne  such  unbroken  and  imperishable  witness, 
we  cannot  in  any  case  but  recognize  the  greatness 
and  heroism  of  his  love  for  mankind.  As  in  the 
case  of  yEschylus,  it  is  the  hunger  and  thirst  after 
■  righteousness,  the  deep  desire  for  perfect  justice 
in  heaven  as  on  earth,  which  would  seem  to  assure 


LA  LEG  END  E  DES  SIECLES.  199 

the  prophet's  inmost  heart  of  its  final  triumph  by 
the  prevalence  of  wisdom  and  of  light  over  all 
claims  and  all  pleas  established  or  asserted  by  the 
children  of  darkness,  so  in  the  case  of  Victor  Hugo 
is  it  the  hunger  and  thirst  after  reconciliation,  the 
love  of  loving  kindness,  the  master  passion  of 
mercy,  which  persists  in  hope  and  insists  on  faith 
even  in  face  of  the  hardest  and  darkest  experience 
through  which  a  nation  or  a  man  can  pass.  When 
evil  was  most  triumphant  throughout  Europe,  he 
put  forth  in  a  single  book  of  verse,  published  with 
strange  difficulty  against  incredible  impediments, 
such  a  protest  as  v/ould  entitle  him  to  say,  in  the 
very  words  he  has  given  to  the  Olympian  of  old — 

Quand,  dans  le  saint  paean  par  les  mondes  chante, 

L'harmonie  amoindrie  avorte  ou  degenere, 

Je  rends  le  rhythme  aux  cieux  par  un  coup  de  tonnerre: 

and  now  more  than  ever  would  the  verses  that 
follow  befit  the  lips  of  their  author,  if  speaking  in 
his  own  person: — 

]\Ion  crane  plein  d'echos,  plein  de  Incurs,  plein  d'yeux. 
Est  I'antre  eblouissant  du  grand  Pan  radieux; 
En  me  voyant  on  croit  entendre  le  murmure 
De  la  ville  habitee  et  de  la  moisson  miire, 
Le  bruit  du  goufFre  au  chant  de  I'azur  reuni, 


200  A  STUDY  OF  VICTOR  HUGO. 

L'onde  sur  I'ocdan,  le  vent  dans  Tiniini, 
Et  le  fremissement  des  deux  ailes  du  cygne. 

It  is  held  unseemly  to  speak  of  the  living  as  we 
speak  of  the  dead;  when  Victor  Hugo  has  joined 
the  company  of  his  equals,  but  apparently  not  till 
then,  it  will  seem  strange  to  regard  the  giver  of 
all  the  gifts  we  have  received  from  him  with  less 
than  love  that  deepens  into  worship,  than  wor- 
ship that  brightens  into  love.  Meantime  it  is 
only  in  the  phrase  of  one  of  his  own  kindred, 
poet  and  exile  and  prophet  of  a  darker  age  than 
his,  that  the  last  word  should  here  be  spoken  of 
the  man  by  whose  name  our  century  will  be 
known  forever  to  all  ages  and  nations  that  keep 
any  record  or  memory  of  what  was  highest  and 
most  memorable  in  the  spiritual  history  of  the 

past: — 

Onorate  raltissimo  poeta. 


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Trom  The  CHURCHMAN'. 

WoRTHiNGTONS  Annual  FOR  1 885,  the  most  beautiful 
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enterprising  publisher's  name.  The  engravings  and 
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rrom  The  EVENING  MAIL  AND  EXPRESS. 

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the  England  of  to-day,  or  June,  1880.  The  method  of 
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From  The  JOURNAL  OF  COMMERCE,  N.  Y. 

Worthington's  Annual. — Among  Mr.  Worthlngton's 
many  excellent  works  for  children,  his  "Annual"  is  per- 
haps the  most  admired.  It  is  a  perfect  child's  book. 
Its  cover  is  bright  and  beautiful.  Its  literary  contents 
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From  The  LIVING  CHURCH,  Chicago. 

Chatterbox  Junior.  New  York  :  R.  Worthington. 
Price,  $1.25. 

There  is  certainly  one  point  in  which  we  cannot  laud 
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construction  as  any  other  class  of  books  published. 
"Chatterbox  Junior"  belongs  to  that  class  of  books 
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best  and  most  welcome  friend.  It  is  just  the  book  to 
delight  a  small  child,  and  an  admirable  thing  for  a 
number  six  Christmas  stocking. 

From  The  TIMES-STAR,  Cincinnati,  O. 

There  was  a  Little  Girl.  By  Henry  Wadsworth 
Longfellow,  illustrated  by  Bertha  M.  Schaeffer.  R. 
Worthington,  N.  Y. 

This  story  in  rhyme  of  "The  Little  Girl  Who  had 
the  Little  Curl,"  is  one  of  the  happiest  tokens  of  that 
genial  and  simple-hearted  temper,  which  made  the 
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FroxQ  The  CHUjaCHMAN. 

F1CTURESQU2  TouRS  IN  AMERICA  Of  the  juniot  United 
Tourist  Oub.  Edited  by  the  Rev.  Edward  T. 
Bromfield.    New  York  :  R.  Worthingt'  >n.    Pp.  200. 

Under  the  fiction  of  a  club  or  class  making  a  tour  of 
the  most  picturesque  parts  of  America,  the?  author  has 
given  us  an  iiitercsting  volume.  Its  facts  and  dates  are 
reliable,  and  it  is  written  in  a  style  which  will  £ommend 
it  to  those  for  whose  use  it  is  chiefly  intended.  There 
are  in  the  volume  one  hundred  and  seventeen  illustra- 
tions, besides  initial  letters,  and  are  made  from  correct 
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represent.  The  tours  begin  on  the  Pacific  coast,  and, 
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It  is  handsomely  bound,  and  will  be  a  welcome  holiday 
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From  The  SUN. 

Around  the  House, — One  of  the  most  noteworthy  or 
the  illustrated  books  for  children  of  the  present  season 
is  "Around  the  House,"  with  bright,  jingling  rhymes, 
by  Mr.  Edward  Willet,  and  pictures  in  colors  from  de- 
signs by  Mr.  Charles  Kendrick.  In  making  books  oi 
this  class,  it  too  frequently  happens  that  all  the  at- 
tention is  given  to  the  pictures,  to  the  great  neglect  of 
the  text.  In  this  book,  equal  pains  have  been  taken 
with  both.  Mr.  Willet  is  one  of  the  best  known  of  the 
young  journalists  of  New  York,  and  in  using  his  leisure 
from  more  serious  work  to  write  these  taking  rhymes 
for  little  ones,  he  has  shown  an  appreciation  of  their  fan- 
cies and  tastes,  which  is  rare  indeed  among  writers. 
Mr.  Kendrick's  versatile  pencil  is  tested  weekly  on  our 
illustrated  papers,  but  he  has  never  done  better  work 
than  in  these  dainty  bits  of  child  life.  The  book  is  pub- 
lished by  R.  Worthington,  New  York 


Prom  The  N.  Y.  EVENING  EXPRESS. 

Swinburne's  "Studies  in  Song"'  demands  and  will 
more  than  repay  careful  reading.  Mr.  Stedman,  who  is 
one  of  the  best  poetical  critics,  calls  Swinburne  the 
sovereign  rhythmist  of  our  time,  and  says  he  far  excels 
all  recent  poets,  of  any  tongue,  in  one  faculty — "his 
miraculous  gift  of  rhythm;"  his  "unprecedented  melody 
and  freedom."  "Words  in  his  hands  are  like  the  ivory 
balls  of  a  juggler,  and  all  words  seem  to  be  in  his 
hands."  "The  first  emotion  of  one  who  studies  his 
works  is  that  of  wonder  at  the  freedom  and  richness  of 
his  diction,  the  susurrus  of  his  rhythm,  his  unconscious 
alliterations,  the  endless  change  of  his  syllabic  har- 
monies." The  chief  poem  in  the  volume  is  devoted  to 
Landor,  who,  like  Swinburne,  was  enamored  of  Greek 
art  and  culture,  and  seems  to  have  had  a  Greek  head 
on  his  English  shoulders.  Published  by  R.  Worthing- 
ton,  770  Broadway. 

From  The  BOSTON  GliOBE. 

/he  Story  of  Chinese  Gordon. — Charles  George 
Gordon  is  the  great  figure  of  the  Christian  soldier, 
absolutely  trusting  in  God  and  bold  and  fearless  in 
enforcing  right  and  justice.  He  is  represented  also  as 
"an  incomparable  blending  of  masterfulness  and  tender- 
ness, of  strength  and  sweetness."  The  purpose  of  Mr. 
Hake's  book  is  to  narrate  Gordon's  military  career  in  the 
light  of  his  character,  and  to  show  the  harmony  between 
them,  and  it  differs  in  this  respect  from  all  of  the  books 
that  the  interest  in  Gordon's  campaign  in  the  Soudan 
has  caused  to  be  issued.  While  it  thus  becomes  a 
tribute  to  his  moral  worth  it  is  not  at  the  sacrifice  of  any 
detail  in  his  history  during  his  service  in  the  Crimea, 
China,  Africa,  India,  the  Cape  of  Good  Hope  and  the 
Soudan,  in  each  of  which  places  the  same  Christian  and 
soldierly  qualities  have  impressed  his  countrymen.  On 
the  other  hand,  the  record  of  his  service  in  garrison  and 
in  the  field  is  particularly  complete.  It  is  an  inspiring 
story  of  one  who  could  ill  be  spared,  for  the  influence 
his  character  has  upon  the  peoples  to  whom  his  mission 
sends  him.     New  York  :  R.  Worthington. 


From  The  GLOBE,  Boston. 

Seven  L,ittle  Maids.     Pictures  and  Verses  by  Maiy  A. 
Lathbury. 

The  familiar  couplets  attributing  certain  qualities, 
according  as  one  is  born  on  this  or  that  day  of  the 
week,  suggest  seven  poems  descriptive  of  young  girls 
born  upon  the  successive  days  of  the  week,  which,  in 
turn,  are  descriptive  of  seven  illustrations  of  the  young 
girls  themselves.  The  pictures  are  finely  drawn  and 
colored,  and  are  effective.  Fringed  covers,  decorated 
with  taste,  inclose  the  leaflets,  one  of  which  groups  the 
seven  little  maids  in  a  pleasing  way.  This  is  as  good  of 
its  kind  as  "  Jack-in-the-Pulpit,"  noticed  elsewhere,  and 
should  be  examined  by  holiday  buyers. 

From  The  INTER-OCEAN. 

The  Kabbala  (R.  Worthington)  is  a  disquisition  on  the 
true  science  of  light,  designed  to  be  an  introductron  to 
the  philosophy  and  theosophy  of  the  ancient  sages.  It 
contains  a  chapter,  also,  on  light  in  the  vegetable  king- 
dom. It  is  by  S.  Pancoast,  M.  D. ,  a  man  held  in  high 
esteem  in  the  medical  profession.  This  book  is  evidently 
the  result  of  profound  study,  long  sust-^ined.  It  breathes 
the  spirit  of  reverence,  while  unfettered  by  dogmas.  It 
is  withal  eminently  practical.  A  great  many  important 
sanitary  suggestions  are  made,  and  some  suggestions 
more  mechanical  or  artistic  than  medical. 

"  The  Kabbala,  or  the  True  Science  of  Light,"  is  a 
curiosity  in  literature.  The  author,  Dr.  S.  Pancoast, 
holds  that  the  old  Kabbala  is  not  only  the  source  of  all 
religious  beliefs,  but  that  it  is,  in  fact,  an  authorized, 
divinely  illuminated  commentary  on  the  Bible  and 
nature,  and  that  the  Bible  is  a  translation  into  words 
of  the  Kabbala  ;  that  is,  that  they  are  identical  and  of 
divine  origin,  revealing  the  work,  will,  and  purposes  of 
God,  as  'well  as  his  character  and  attributes.  This 
theory  is  elucidated  at  some  length,  as  a  foundation  for 
another  theory  of  the  remedial  properties  of  light,  to 
prove  which  is  the  author's  main  purpose. 


Prom  The  GIjOBE,  Boston, 

Jack-in-the-Pulpit. — A  fine  poem  by  Miss  Smith,  of 
Medford,  which  introduces  common  flowers  of  New 
England,  was  sent  to  J.  G.  Whittier,  the  poet,  when  he 
was  compiling  "Child  Life."  Under  his  editorship, 
with  his  autograph  letter,  it  now  appears  in  leaflets  in 
fringed  covers.  It  furnishes  subjects  for  some  as 
perfectly-colored  illustrations  of  familiar  flowers  as  will 
be  issued  this  season.  Jack-in-the-Pulpit,  lilies,  ane- 
mones, violets,  buttercups,  clover  blossoms,  daisies, 
dandelions,  and  columbines  have  their  season's  fresh- 
ness and  charm.  Both  covers  have  beautiful  designs, 
the  front  one  bearing  a  likeness  of  Whittier,  New 
Vork  :  R,  Worthington, 

From  The  BOSTON"  GAZETTB. 

"Through  Cities  and  Prairie  Lands.'  by  Lady  Duff'us 
Hardy,  relates  in  a  spirited  and  sketchy  manner  the  in- 
cidents of  a  journey  across  this  country.  It  is  a  breezy 
and  highly  entertaining  book.  The  descriptive  portions 
are  full  of  picturesqueness,  and  the  style  generally  is 
sprightly  and  remarkably  attractive.  The  work  is  in- 
teresting and  readable  from  cover  to  over.  Published 
by  R.  Worthington,  New  York. 

From  The  ALBANY  AftQUS, 

A  Century  OF  Roundels  and  Otkzr  Poems,  By  Alger- 
non Charles  Swinburne.  New  York  :  R.  Worthing- 
ton,    Price  $1.75. 

The  rythmic  melody  of  his  verses  has  a  most  won- 
derful fascination,  and  when  his  genius  finds  voice  in 
the  roundel  the  perfection  of  poetic  form  is  reached. 
One  is  surprised  to  find  in  the  works  of  a  young  man 
such  tender  and  beautiful  allusions  to  childhood  as  Mr. 
Swinburne's  poems  show.  It  is  useless  to  pass  general 
criticism  upon  this  book.  We  have  to  take  each 
roundel  by  itself,  study  the  structure,  dwell  upon  the 
music  that  lingers  in  the  language,  and  saturate  our 
souls  with  the  delicate  sentiments  that  inspired  the  poet. 


Prom  The  MAIL  AND  EXPRESS. 

Theophile  Gautier. — ^That  Theophile  Gautier  is  a 
master  in  many  arts  is  known  to  all  who  are  familiar 
with  modern  literature  the  world  over.  After  his  mas- 
ter, Hugo,  whose  extravagance  he  has  been  wise  enough 
to  avoid,  and  after  the  greater,  Balzac,  who  wrote  the 
Human.  Comedy,  he  is  the  mightiest  force  of  recent 
French  fiction,  possessed  of  every  quality  that  ensures 
success,  clear-sighted,  strong-willed,  felicitous  and 
audacious,  with  a  style  that  is  the  despair  of  his  contem- 
poraries, and  will  be  the  delight  of  posterity,  as  pict- 
uresque as  Shakespeare  or  Homer,  as  intense  as 
^schylus,  as  ardent  as  Sappho — he  is  an  astonishing 
and  extraordinary  writer,  who  has  many  followers,  but 
only  one  true  disciple,  Georg  Ebers,  who  breathes  the 
breath  of  life  into  the  mummies  who  died  before 
Pharaoh,  and  creates  souls  under  the  robes  of  death. 
Such  is  Theophile  Gautier,  six  of  whose  fantastic 
romances  have  just  been  done  into  English  by  Lafcadio 
Heam,  and  published  handsomely,  in  a  keepsake  form, 
by  R.  Worthington.  These  romances  illustrate  many 
times,  lands,  persons,  customs,  Egyptian,  Roman, 
Greek,  Christian.  Their  tides  are  :  One  of  Cleopatra's 
Nights ;  Clarimonde  ;  Auria  Marcella,  a  Souvenir  of 
Pompeii ;  The  Mummy's  Foot ;  Omphale,  a  Ro- 
coco Story  ;  and  King  Candaules.  There  is  nothing 
like  the  perfection  of  these  masterpieces,  outside  of 
Shakespeare,  of  whom  the  Cleopatra  study  perpetually 
reminds  us,  the  Shakespeare  who  drew  so  skilfully  the 
world's  enchantress,  and  her  Herculean  Roman,  and 
who  paintec  both  with  the  matchless  pencil  of  Nature. 
It  is  as  Art,  pure  and  simple,  one  and  indivisible,  that 
we  must  approach  these  noble  works,  which  now  sug- 
gest Titian  and  Giorgione  ;  again,  Velasquez  and  Car- 
ravaggio  ;  and  again,  Jerome,  Coumans,  Leys,  and  the 
existing  Belgian  painters.  It  is  to  a  gallery  that  this 
book  admits  us,  and  we  follow  it  delightedly.  R. 
Worthington. 


STROUDSCl/RG  P'CDllC 
MONROE  cmjY  LIBRARY 


